You may already own Edgar Wright‘s Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but will we ever see his sitcom Spaced on DVD? And could there be another Spaced project in the works?
Most Americans are familiar with Wright’s feature film work — the stateside successes of both Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz launched the Brit director into Hollywood, and he directed arguably the best fake trailer in Grindhouse — but he also directed a two season sitcom called Spaced a few years back, starring frequent collaborator Simon Pegg.
Spaced starred Pegg and British actress Jessica Stevenson as a pair of pop culture spewing twenty-somethings living together in London, and ran for two years in 1999. Though it’s been made available in the U.K., we’ve yet to see a North American DVD release. While at Comic-Con, Wright explained that they’re still trying to make it happen.
“We’re trying to some music cleared, and then hopefully we’ll have a Region 1 release,” he said. “We don’t want to release it if we have to change the show, because I think it would be weird to have to go back and change it and stuff. But we’re hopeful that we can do that, and there’s definitely a lot of interest to do that.
“When we made the show, back in 1999, you could get clearances on some music if you have rights to everywhere in the world except North America,” he continued. “When the four of us were back in London, making a show, not really knowing how it’s going to get to the British public, [we] kept thinking, ‘Hey, we could get the Darth Vader theme from Empire Strikes Back — but not North America. F— it!’ You don’t really think that far ahead. Now, of course, we’ve learned our lesson.”
Although the series creators have debunked rumors of resuming the show for further seasons, Wright doesn’t rule out some way to bring the Spaced crew back. Perhaps a reunion show?
“We never say never in terms of that…there’s not going to be a third season, it would be silly now. It would be ten years since the first season, so I think the only option would be to do something that sort of like catches our heroes ten years later. And that can work brilliantly in the case of something like Before Sunrise — or Before Sunset, I always get them mixed up — Before Sunrise…(joking) We could do Muppet Baby Spaced!”
