Barba-Hell-No: Seven Movies That Should Be TV Shows Before Barbarella

A Barbarella TV show? Really? Make one of these instead.

By David Wharton | Updated 4 months ago

A few weeks ago when it was announced that the director of Drive was working on a Barbarella TV series, my brain experienced a cognitive dissonance that gave me a concussion. Why would a fellow as talented Nicolas Winding Refn want anything to do with a movie that I’d only ever heard bad things about? Things like “That movie made me bleed from the eyeballs,” or “That movie stole all my traveler’s checks and then punched me in the solar plexus.” Never having seen the film, I realized my preconceptions could be wrong. Perhaps Barbarella contained some unseen brilliance just waiting for me to discover it. So I watched it.

Let me just say this: there are a lot of people out there that have a serious mad-on for Barbarella actress Jane Fonda. Some would claim this is because of her politics, or because of her actions during the Vietnam War that earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane.” I’m here to tell you that those are red herrings. Anyone who hates Jane Fonda has unquestionably been forced to sit through Barbarella at some point. This is a movie that made me question mankind’s capacity for goodness. This is a movie that made me bored of the mostly naked female form. I’m pretty sure this movie gave me diabetes.

I still don’t know whether Nicolas Winding Refn has been kidnapped and is being forced to make a Barbarella TV series at gunpoint, but all of this did get me thinking. Thinking of all the science fiction movies that are more deserving of the TV treatment than Barbarella. That list is practically endless, but here are seven of them.