Before Steven Spielberg made Jawsthe first of the summer blockbusters, Peter Benchley wrote a novel about a small resort town with some very big problems. Adultery, organized crime, crooked real estate deals, and a mayor who’d sell out just about anyone to keep the tourists spending money. Oh, and there was a giant shark eating people. Spielberg’s 1975 masterpiece jettisoned most of those subplots to make one of the greatest cinematic thrillers ever made. That may have been a good decision for a two-hour movie, but Benchley’s original story has plenty of small town scandal and corruption to keep a TV audience hooked in between shark attacks.
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Universal should revive Jaws as Amity, a prestige TV limited series that makes the town itself as important as the monster terrorizing its beaches. Benchley’s novel had a lot more suburban class struggle in its pages than the movie did. The show could be about rich summer residents mingling with working-class locals, marriages unraveling, and plenty of Big Little Lies-style intrigue by way of Crystal Lake. All while a great white shark terrorizes the beaches. Here are the actors we think should bring this new vision of Jawsto life on the small screen.
Keegan-Michael Key as Chief Martin Brody
Chief Martin Brody is just a regular guy trying to do his job, but everyone in town seems to be making it harder and harder. Key is a good choice for the part, as he can switch from real anger to dry sarcasm to desperation without losing the everyday guy aspect of the character. Key showed his range in Hulu’s Reboot, playing an actor hungry for respect and grappling with a complicated personal life. That mix of overt and repressed frustration would serve him well as Amity’s Chief of Police, especially as his marriage begins to fall apart. Plus, he’s played an officer of the law many times on Key & Peele, the sketch comedy show he created with Jordan Peele.
Key’s improv background might also lend itself to some terrific exchanges with the actual Martha’s Vineyard residents we’d have cast throughout the series. Spielberg found moments like “That’s some bad hat, Harry” in the townspeople, and we want to see what Key could do with those interactions. In Benchley’s novel, Brody is an Amity native, not a New York transplant like the one Spielberg dreamed up. The outsider aspect of the film could remain, but the class struggles and political corruption in the town should be more prominent.
Betty Gilpin as Ellen Brody
Spielberg’s Ellen Brody is a warm, grounded presence in the film. Benchley’s is far more complicated, a woman raised with wealth who now questions the life she has created with her husband. Betty Gilpin has shown remarkable versatility, from her Emmy-nominated role as Debbie Eagan in Netflix’s GLOW to her fierce performance as Crystal in the satirical horror thriller The Hunt. She knows how to make complicated women compelling without expecting people to agree with everything they do.
Gilpin can have her own real story by resurrecting Ellen’s affair with Matt Hooper. Her privileged upbringing also allows her to see Amity’s social disparities a little differently when the summer residents return and remind her of the life she left behind. The Brodys’ marriage is on the rocks, and Gilpin and Key could make that just as interesting as the shark hunt.
Wyatt Russell as Matt Hooper
In the film Matt Hooper was the sort of eager marine biologist you wanted to have as your best friend. We like Avengers: Doomsday star Wyatt Russell for the part, because Benchley’s Hooper is much less lovable. Russell can be a smart, slightly arrogant guy who has the charm to get away with being a total pain in the ass. He’s a fish geek, kind of sexy, which matters when we bring back his affair with Ellen Brody. Ellen used to date Hooper’s older brother. This just makes a bad situation much worse. Also, in the movie Brody and Hooper become friends pretty quickly, but in the novel their relationship is much more antagonistic.
Russell has already done a version of this romantic rivalry in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, with his character Lee Shaw vying with Bill Randa for the affections of Keiko Miura. One of them becomes John Goodman, and the other one becomes Kurt Russell. I guess Keiko dodged a bullet. Hooper is less fortunate. Unlike Richard Dreyfuss in the film, Benchley’s marine biologist does not survive his encounter with the shark cage.
Nick Offerman as Quint
In The Last of Us, Nick Offerman played Bill, a survivalist who had spent years preparing for the end of civilization and discovered that living with another person was far more difficult. You could just as easily be describing the sailor Quint in Jaws. In Benchley’s novel, Quint is a working fisherman who agrees to hunt the shark for $10,000. Nick Offerman looks like a guy who knows his way around a fishing boat. And he really doesn’t care whether Brody likes him or not. And Hooper can’t tell him how to do his job either. After years of watching Offerman on Parks and Recreation, who wouldn’t want to see Ron Swanson putting an arrogant marine biologist and uptight police chief in their place? The book also gives Quint a darker death than the movie. The shark snags him on a harpoon line and drags him under the water. He was just a fisherman who finally reeled in something too big for his own good.
Margo Martindale as Mayor Laura Vaughn
Mayor Larry Vaughn was already one of Spielberg’s most frustrating characters, a politician who kept the beaches open knowing full well what was swimming just offshore. Benchley’s novel compounded the problem by tying his financial problems to organized crime and a dubious real estate development. Not only could tourism suffer from the closing of the beaches. He could suffer with the mob, who want their money.
Margo Martindale has played enough dangerous people to know the scariest ones rarely raise their voices. Her Mags Bennett in Justifiedcould turn a regular conversation into a death threat, and her work as Claudia in The Americans proved she could destroy someone’s life without wrinkling her blouse. Now put her in charge of Amity. Gender swap the character and cast Martindale as Laura Vaughn, a woman who knows every business owner on the island. She’s lovely and giving, and perfectly willing to sacrifice a few tourists to protect the town’s economy. Or her finances.
Bobby Cannavale has made a career out of playing the type of guys you don’t want to show up at your front door. His Gyp Rosetti in Boardwalk Empirewas a gangster who could turn a minor insult into a bloodbath, while Irving in Mr. Robot was considerably more laid back about the horrible things he did for a living. That makes him a natural for the mob-connected real estate operator from Benchley’s novel, Tino Russo.
One of the reasons Mayor Vaughn is so dedicated to preserving Amity’s beaches is Russo’s involvement with Caskata Estates. Russo is determined to protect his investment, especially since the police chief is keen on keeping everyone out of the water. The town’s summer economy is already hanging by a thread, and the last thing it needs is a shark snacking on its visitors. Russo would be the most dangerous character in the show outside the shark.
There’s one last casting call we can leave to you and the imaginary showrunners who’d pick up this pitch and run with it. The swimmer who dies in the first scene has to be a major star. Put her name at the top of the credits, put her in the marketing, let the audiences think she’s one of the leads, and then go full Drew Barrymore in Scream. Spielberg’s original opening is already one of the scariest sequences in film history. Imagine watching it thinking they would never kill her.
And if Amity gets a second season, I’d just forget about the Brody family altogether and head straight for the marine park from Jaws 3-D. Strip away the unnecessary family ties, and you have a great Michael Crichton premise: a corporate-owned water park, scientists warning something is amiss, executives refusing to listen, and a giant shark on the loose among the tourists. The original Jawstaught us that you don’t need much more than a beach and a hungry shark to terrify an audience. Imagine the possibilities of an entire theme park with an Oceanic theme.
Who should be the star who gets killed by the shark in our Jawsreboot? Fans of Benchley’s original novel, who would you cast as Harry Meadows, Amity’s newspaper editor?
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