'50 Shades' Friday: Should 'Fifty Shades Of Grey' Be A TV Movie?

The 50 Shades Of Grey movie hasn't even released a trailer yet (the official Fifty Shades Of Grey movie trailer is slated for a July 24 release), but naysayers are already saying that Christian Grey, Ana Steele and all their friends and toys should be relegated to television.

Starz CEO Chris Albrecht reportedly wanted to commission the Fifty Shades Of Grey movie, as well as its respective sequels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, to be a mini-series on his own network. And he has a point: With a 50 Shades Of Grey television mini-series, as opposed to a full-fledged studio cinema production, you have more options, more time and, depending on the network, more freedom to be loyal to the saucy source material without outside pressures.

Albrecht argued, I'm the guy who called up Universal and said, 'I'll get you three years on the air as a series. Let's just do a Fifty Shades of Grey series.' You don't have to worry about box office. You don't have to worry about a rating. You can tell the story the right way. But movie people think things should be movies, and authors think things should be movies because up until recently, movies have been the Tiffany-jeweled crown," Albrecht continued. "And certainly from what I see you people writing, that seems to be changing."

Of course, that likely would have affected the 50 Shades Of Grey budget and casting: most TV movies are considered considerably lower rent than blockbusters, so the studio would have had to get someone cheaper than Jamie Dornan for Christian Grey and Dakota Johnson for Ana Steele. Hell, they may not even be able to afford Rita Ora as Mia Grey with a TV budget.

Still, considering lots of fans of the Fifty Shades Of Grey books may be too bashful to buy a ticket and sit through the steamy series in a movie theater, he may be on to something. It's the reason more people stream porn and Skinemax than going to creepy theaters that used to litter Times Square: Most people are still ashamed, somewhat, of expressing themselves sexually, especially in public. Which in one way is good, because, well, we don't all need to see that, and the criminal justice system is already thriving with the war on drugs and doesn't really need to add to overcrowded prisons for indecent exposure and public lewdness. If we wanted that, we could just ride the subway.