I know all those words separately but when you put them together they make no sense. Is there anything more annoying on Facebook than constant begging from the bored idiots in your life playing FarmVille and other “social games?” I don’t care that you need six pieces of wood to finish your barn or that your chicken just laid a purple egg. Time Magazine even named the game one of the 50 worst inventions in human history. Thankfully, FarmVille has been hemorrhaging users over the last couple years, so hopefully it (and parent company Zynga that produces it and a million other clones and knock-offs) will finally go away.
Now Deadline is reporting that FarmVille is on its way to becoming an animated series, and Brett Ratner is attached as producer. This is one of those Hollywood deals that happens because some idiot reads a glowing newspaper article without really understanding it and decides that there’s money to be made. Any adult human being can tell you that there is absolutely nothing about FarmVille that would make an interesting TV show. There’s no characters. There’s just… a farm. And clicking a lot.
The only way the show would be interesting is if it was actually about real-world people who were unhealthily obsessed with their idiotic virtual farms to the detriment of anything else in their life. Kind of like that It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia episode where they play World of Warcraft, only with moms. But I truly doubt that’s the direction that they want to take this.
Ratner will work with Canadian production company Six Eleven Media to produce a half-hour animated series based on the property. No network has expressed interest yet, and hopefully this will just be one of those big dumb California ideas that dies in childbirth. Think about how annoying it will be when you’re watching some other show only to have it interrupted by a FarmVille announcement begging for carrots for an imaginary horse?