Ryan Murphy Plans A ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ Prequel Series

It’s not clear what was the first prequel in entertainment history, but when you read that Ryan Murphy is planning a series for Netflix exploring the early days of “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” character Nurse Ratched, it’s easy to know what you want to be the last one. With projects like this one, the “Joker origin” movie Warner Bros. announced last week, Robin Hood and a dozen others, Hollywood seems to have lost its mind for origin stories, effectively ruining interest in anything resembling ambiguity – much less mystery – for audiences across the globe.

According to a report published Wednesday on Deadline, Murphy is set to direct the pilot of “Ratched” and shepherd newcomer Evan Romansky through two seasons of “her murderous progression through the mental health care system. Murphy cast his “American Horror Story” and “American Crime Story” leading lady Sarah Paulson in the title role, and allegedly spent a year securing the rights to the character, and the permission of the Saul Zaentz estate, vis a vis executive producer Michael Douglas. A compassionless rule-follower and all-around unhappy person, smugly presiding over her helpless wards? Sure, that sounds like Nurse Ratched. But did she make a “murderous progression” that audiences didn’t see in “Cuckoo’s Nest?” It doesn’t seem that complicated, or compelling.

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The popularity of superhero origin stories – or at least foundational tales of how groups of characters came together as a team – surely has something to do with this dispiriting trend. In spite of the iconography of Sam Raimi’s blockbuster “Spider-Man” trilogy, Marc Webb not only revisited the character’s birth with his own series of films but also doubled down on it, expanding that mythology to include details about Peter Parker’s parents that ultimately added nothing but confusion. As recently as 2016, filmmakers were still including an obligatory scene showing the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents. Only with The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” did a superhero film skillfully avoid this expository need, letting the character manufacture conflicting, unverified and ultimately unimportant back stories to legitimize his cracked worldview.

It’s also possible that “Star Wars” is to blame for this trend, thanks to its trilogy focused on the birth of Darth Vader, whose story was admittedly intriguing but otherwise beautifully executed in the Original Trilogy. And within a universe where ordinary individuals gain, possess or develop superhuman skills, it’s fair, and occasionally, interesting to learn where and how they got them. But short of a handful of important exceptions – Jimmy McGill’s moral decay on “Better Call Saul” being the best of all possible examples – has literally anyone other than Ryan Murphy ever watched “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” and wondered, about of all characters, Nurse Ratched, “I wonder how she got to be such a miserable asshole?”

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This fixation on deep-diving into characters’ back stories has evolved from curiosity into fan fiction, even when done by professionals, and it’s spoiling the hermetically-sealed journeys of storytellers and original creators who, as author, have God forbid chosen to focus on a different aspect of a character – or different character entirely! – than the one somebody is currently starting a Subreddit to speculate about or deconstruct. Notwithstanding the faulty premise that fans share ownership of the characters and worlds that obsess them, creators are not obligated to provide or create a comprehensive background for their characters, either as a supplement or centerpiece to their stories.

Perhaps, most frighteningly of all, audiences simply want too much content, and know too much about its making at this point, to be satisfied by a single, well-defined, self-contained story. While creating complex heroes and villains – or creating characters too complex to easily earn those distinctions – has become an appreciable necessity after decades of good and bad guys with no dimensionality at all, it feels no longer possible to say, “I know as much as I need to” in order to appreciate or enjoy a story. How does a character’s gender impact what she or he does? Or ethnicity? Or upbringing? First sexual experience? First job? Relationship with a parent? Hair color? Surely they’re all relevant. Or maybe they are not. And maybe some of them needn’t be.

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In which case, maybe it’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” that set us on this path of prequel self-destruction – after all, the express purpose of Tom Stoppard’s 1966 play was to explore, if playfully, two seemingly unremarkable characters on the periphery of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” The problem we seem to be facing now is that we’ve convinced ourselves that all stories are equally interesting, at the expense of more important ones, and deciding we know better than the creators who are doing the telling.