Afoul and Colorful in Florida

The track record of transforming novels into television series has been spotty. “Perry Mason,” “Little House on the Prairie” and “Peyton Place” fared well on the small screen. But who remembers the TV versions of “The Long Hot Summer” or “Life With Father”?

Barry Sonnenfeld, director of such blockbusters as “Men in Black,” “Get Shorty” and “The Addams Family,” is fully aware of the pitfalls of adapting a novel into a weekly show. But he believes he’s avoided all of the traps with his first TV series, ABC’s “Maximum Bob.”

Based on a bestseller by Elmore Leonard (“Get Shorty,” “Out of Sight”), the series follows the adventures of an outrageous, flamboyant Florida judge named Bob Isom Gibbs (Beau Bridges), who is known by the moniker Maximum Bob because he relishes giving everyone the maximum sentence.

Also inhabiting Bob’s quirky, bizarre town of Deep Water is Kathy Baker (Liz Vassey), a Miami-based public defender who is willing to stand up to Bob; Leanne (Kiersten Warren), Bob’s colorful wife who once performed as a mermaid and now is inhabited by the spirit of a 12-year-old slave girl; Garry Hammond (Sam Robards), the local sheriff who has taken up ballroom dancing to help him cope with the recent death of his wife; and Bogart (Paul Vogt) and Dirk Crow (Peter Allen Vogt), the bespectacled, overweight, moronic twins who are always getting into trouble.

Besides being one of the executive producers, Sonnenfeld also directed the pilot episode of “Maximum Bob,” which premieres Tuesday in the “NYPD Blue” time slot.

Sonnenfeld, who is currently directing the big screen version of “The Wild, Wild West,” as well as executive producing ABC’s new version of “Fantasy Island,” says the reason he thinks “Maximum Bob” works is that Leonard’s novels are rich in characters, language and tone.

“You don’t read an Elmore Leonard book necessarily because you are going to read the single greatest plot; you read it because you are in love with the places he’s created, the characters he created and the tone of his storytelling,” says Sonnenfeld. “That’s something that’s very translatable for many, many weeks.”

Though Leonard is not involved in the series, he gave Sonnenfeld his blessing, “which is exactly the same thing he did with ‘Get Shorty.’ He’s never involved on any of his projects once they are no longer books. His feeling is that he wrote the book and what happens after that is none of his business, so he never looks at scripts. Or if he has an opinion, he doesn’t share it.”

Sonnenfeld is happy ABC is giving the offbeat series a seven-week tryout during the summer.

“You can’t go and say, ‘This looks like a cop show,’ ” says Sonnenfeld, who believes “Bob” will appeal to fans of “Northern Exposure,” “Twin Peaks” and “Picket Fences.”

“In fact, it’s sort of weird in the first place because it seems to be an hourlong comedy, which seems to be a nontraditional format for an hour.”

Though Bob is described in the novel as resembling tall, lanky character actor Harry Dean Stanton, Sonnenfeld believes the younger and more robust Bridges is the perfect choice as the irreverent judge.

“I talked to Elmore Leonard about it and he said the thing about Bob is, he’s sort of a lovable snake,” says Sonnenfeld. “He’s got to be a snake. You can’t make him too nice, but you have to love him anyway. Beau has this sort of incredibly kind, open face and personality, which lets you get away with him being a total jerk and politically incorrect with what he’s saying.”

Emmy Award-winning Bridges was impressed with the pilot script written by executive producer Alex Gansa. “It’s very hard to get that many colorful characters in a full novel and put them on screen in an hour. I thought he introduced them quite well and still made them entertaining. It made me laugh, and not many things make me giggle when I read them.”

Bridges admires the way Bob shoots from the hip. “In today’s world, you don’t hear many people who fire off exactly how they feel,” he says. “He certainly does that. You always know where you stand with Bob. Everyone seems to be so political now in the way they talk, and Bob, he has certain ways he feels about things.”

Bob, though, has been softened for the small screen. “I think Bob, as he appears in that novel, might be hard to take for two or three sittings,” Bridges says.

“We wanted to make him a little bit more grounded. What we did was develop his relationship with his wife. Though he’s very flirtatious and sniffs around like a hound dog, which is how he describes himself sometimes, he basically, deep down, really loves his wife. That’s a real solid relationship.”

Some of the first episode’s biggest laughs are supplied by the Crow brothers, whose alligator causes all sorts of havoc for Bob, Leanne and their dog. Sonnenfeld cracks up when he recalls how he cast the Vogt brothers as Bogart and Dirk.

“They are actually stand-up comedians in Orlando,” he says. “They work at Disney World. They sent two tapes. One tape was their real audition, which I never saw, and the other tape, they pretended that they were these guys and they were really stupid.

“I thought, ‘Where did they find these two morons?’ Three weeks into the shoot, as we were wrapping up, they said, ‘Which audition tape did you like better?’ I never thought they were actors. I thought I had hired two total morons. They’re great.”

“Maximum Bob” premieres Tuesday at 10 p.m. on ABC.