The Big Picture

In the new series Discontinued, Bruce Campbell takes viewers back in time to explore failed products and phenomena that faded from the public consciousness. Campbell discusses the success of Evil Dead Rise and says “you bet your bottom dollar” more films in the series are coming. In the wake of some older shows, like Suits, seeing renewed success on streaming, Campbell shares his thoughts on a potential Burn Notice revival.

In the new series Discontinued, it’s not a matter of where Bruce Campbell finds himself but when. Stranded in the year 2037 in a fancy bunker filled with relics of times gone by, Campbell serves as host for the new pop-culture documentary, which looks back at various products and phenomenons — things like the Furby, the BlackBerry device, and even Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel — that may have been successful for a while but eventually faded from the public consciousness. Directed by Brian Volk-Weiss, the creator of The Toys That Made Us and The Movies That Made Us, and produced by Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort, Discontinued premiered on the Maximum Effort Channel on Fubo last week and is now streaming new episodes each Wednesday.

In this one-on-one interview with Collider, Campbell, the cult movie icon still best known for playing the gloriously lunkheaded hero Ash Williams in the original Evil Dead trilogy, talks about whether he’s as obsessed with the past as his new show is and ruminates on the dangers of artificial intelligence (a running theme in Discontinued). He also discusses the potential to revive some of his more popular, non-Ash characters — hey, if Suits can find its way back to the mainstream, why not Burn Notice?! — and gives some hints about the future of the Evil Dead franchise in the wake of Evil Dead Rise’s success earlier this year.

COLLIDER: When you got the pitch and the offer for Discontinued, what was it about this show that perked your interest and got you thinking that this would be an interesting project to be involved with?

BRUCE CAMPBELL: I had to audition. So it was a long, grueling process. I had to beat out about 100 other hosts. Wink Martindale even came and tried out, but he was too young for the part. So they gave it to me.

Aha! [Laughs]

CAMPBELL: The trick is, when you see projects come across your desk: Is there any pulse here? The people involved. The project itself. It’s a quirky concept — a guy in some bunker in the future, wearing stylish suits, talking about things that are discontinued. That’s its own wacky premise. But, honestly, when you hear about the guys [involved] — Ryan Reynolds and everything that he’s doing. The guy has a gin, a soccer team, a mobile phone [company] … it’s time for a network! So that’s who you really want to be in the sandbox with, someone who kind of has a clue and is going for it. Not someone who’s trying to pitch 15-year-old ideas. These guys are on the move. So it’s fun to kind of try and stay relevant with the relevant people.

Image via Maximum Effort

So Discontinued kind of makes “cherishing the past” part of its mission statement. Is that something that you personally concern yourself with or feel like you do enough?

CAMPBELL: Well, some of the past needs to just be never, never brought up and never revisited. But some of the past is awesome. I get nostalgic about things that my wife laughs about. I’ll watch a screening of Bubba Ho-Tep or something, and I’ll go, “Yeah, boy, that movie was a fun experience.” And my wife goes, “Are you out of your mind? You were miserable during that whole shoot! You don’t know what you’re talking about!” I always remember things better than they were, and some people, I’m sure, remember things worse than they were. I think we wanted to be sort of snarky [with Discontinued]. But there’s no reason to make real fun of the Furby. They had engineers. They had to program it. They had to build it. Someone had to think it up. It had to get approved. Just because it failed miserably, that’s nobody’s fault. So did the Star Wars-themed hotel. Thought up by very intelligent people who made a lot of money at Disney Imagineering. So, it’s funny … you never know. Like this show — we could be the victim of our own concept.

Is there anything that Discontinued covers over the course of its run that you had completely forgotten about until the script showed up in your inbox?

CAMPBELL: All of them! Because the one thing you start to remember is … you go, “Oh, this thing was around so briefly that, unless you bought it as a kid …” Half of these things I don’t remember! I think we covered three or four of these items per episode. So, times 10, that’s about 40 of these discontinued items, and there’s some obscure stuff in there that’s great. But there’s the ubiquitous stuff too: BlackBerry, which my agent to this day is still pining for. But it wasn’t even a bad item at the time. It just got passed up. People move beyond it.

I’ve seen the first episode, and it has this running theme of “Artificial intelligence is going to kill us all!” I wondered if Bruce Campbell’s personal concerns about A.I. are as big as this show’s seems to be?

CAMPBELL: [Laughs] They are not. I do not share the same paranoia that my show does. I dicked around with some A.I. image generating. I said, “Bruce Campbell in an action movie.” And, oh my god, the images that came up. They can’t do fingers! I said, “Bruce Campbell in an action movie called Death in the Afternoon” or whatever. They can’t do English letters! At least, not the program I was using. And I now know when an article is written by A.I. It’s this really flowery language that adds up to nothing. It’s the weirdest thing. Thank god, they started to put a little disclaimer now on some articles, saying that it’s been written with the help of A.I. Which means what? You fed it through to see what it thought? Maybe a few tweaks here and there.

So I don’t fear it yet. I think it’s way more prevalent than we realize, and it goes beyond the “Say ‘yes’ for help. Say ‘no’ to be transferred. Say ‘help’ for agent.” I think it’s way past that. But I think I’m actually fine with it taking over the world if it’ll let me book my own hotel room or suggest the best hotel room based on my criteria. If it works for me — okay! But this whole “take over the world” … if it’s programmed to do that, it will? Am I so foolish to think that you have to type in “take over the world” for it to take over the world? Or is it these behavioral algorithms that you program? I mean, I don’t know any of this crap, thank god!

The Evil Dead films have a massive cult audience to this day, and even projects you’ve done like Bubba Ho-Tep and The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. still have devoted fan bases. But, in the spirit of Discontinued, I wanted to ask if there’s a film or show in your filmography that maybe has been lost to time that you feel deserves a reappraisal?

CAMPBELL: Yeah, a film called Running Time.

I haven’t seen that one! I’ll have to check it out.

CAMPBELL: Well, see, case in point, Robert. It was a mid-’90s movie. I had just come from working on McHale’s Navy, which was a very dumb experience. It was a very weak attempt at making a movie. We didn’t have a script for shit. We made up our lines all day long, and that thing was going nowhere fast … which is fine. We managed to have fun. But, afterward, a buddy of mine came up with a movie. Black-and-white crime drama, shot in 16 millimeter, one shot. It’s the one-shot conceit movie that was done in the mid-’90s, and they hadn’t really made one-shot movies yet. The Hitchcock movie Rope was the closest one that we could compare it to at the time. But we’re going down alleys. We’re having real-time sex scenes in vans. We’re going upstairs in apartments. And I defy you to find the hidden cuts.

I watched it with a real geeky film audience at, like, USC one time, and these kids were grabbing the edge of their chair because it really sucked them in, and it never let them go. There was never a cutaway. It’s all one continuous shot. And it really deserves it because it caught a lot of us at the peak of our powers. The mid-’90s were sort of the peak of my powers, as far as being an actor on screen and my abilities. So, yeah, there’s always stuff like that. There was Missing Links, a pilot that I did based on a book. It was basically Cheers at a public golf course in upstate New York. We tested great. It tested off the charts, but they couldn’t find a slot for us. That’s going to happen. George Clooney — how many pilots did he try? Ten or so before he did ER? You’ve got to throw stuff up on the wall sometimes. I guess that’s what we’re celebrating.

Related Did You Catch Both Bruce Campbell Cameos in ‘Evil Dead Rise’? The grooviest actor keeps haunting the best horror franchise.

It has now been seven months since the excellent Evil Dead Rise was released in theaters. Now that the dust has settled, were you happy with how it was received by audiences and the Evil Dead fan base? And have you, Sam [Raimi], and Rob [Tapert] started talking about where the franchise might go next yet?

CAMPBELL: Yes and yes. We were very happy with what [Evil Dead Rise director] Lee Cronin did. He did a great job, to the point where he’s going to be hard to employ again because everybody wants to use him now. So we’ll see if we get him back or not! It’s made the most money of any Evil Dead movie so far at $140 million. So, yeah, you bet your bottom dollar we’re going to do a few more. We’re going to do them probably more like every two to three years now, rather than every 10 years. But, hey, we’ve seen with Star Wars — you don’t want to wear people out. Keep them guessing! We never wore out our welcome with Evil Dead because we never choked them.

That’s right. You’ve got to pace this stuff out a little bit.

CAMPBELL: Yeah, every decade squeeze one out.

Image via Renaissance Pictures

According to the Interwebs, the next thing I think you’ve got coming is Hysteria!, which is a 1980s-set, Satanic-panic series for Peacock. Is that right?

CAMPBELL: Correct. I’m going back to work to finish it up in Georgia now that the strike is over. I’m looking forward to that. That’s a whole new deal that I sort of had almost forgotten about. It’s sort of late ’80s, small town in Michigan, and I just love the setting of it. All the cars are really boxy, and there are ashtrays on all the desks in the police station. It’s fun. It’s like watching an old TV show.

Speaking of old TV shows, I don’t know if you know this, but old episodes of the USA show Suits somehow became the surprise hit of the summer on Netflix. Doesn’t that mean that it’s about time for those seven seasons of Burn Notice to roll back around?

CAMPBELL: Yeah, it’s about time. It’s also time for some Burn Notice movies. Because there’s no shortage of perps out there. There’s no shortage of creeps and weirdos. Michael Weston and Fiona have a kid now.

So we’ve got an in!

CAMPBELL: Oh, in the spy business, that’s a target. Children are targets. Family are targets. You’re never supposed to have a family as a spy.

Image via USA Network

Everyone asks you all the time if you’ll ever play Ash again. I’m not going to do that, but I did plan to ask you if there are any non-Ash roles that you’ve played that you would be keen to revisit. Does this mean Burn Notice is at the top of that list?

CAMPBELL: Oh, Burn Notice 100 percent. I know how to reintroduce the character of Sam Axe. He’d be winning the Hemingway [Look-Alike] Contest down in the Keys. We would find him in the middle of winning the Hemingway Contest. He’s got the big beard, and he’s living the good life down in the Keys. Then they have to drag him away from that. Brisco I would do again. Because now he would be a lawyer in San Francisco in the ’20s, driving cars around, and you find out that maybe he’s got a kid with Dixie Cousins. Maybe you find out who killed Lord Bowler with Lord Bowler’s son, who we didn’t know. So maybe the two sons team up to find out who killed this guy. Maybe [Brisco] saddles up again, and maybe it hurts a little in the saddle. There’s a lot of stuff you can do. But there are also plenty of shows I would not revisit. I don’t think I need to go back and do more Knots Landing. No one needs that.

You have often been identified or have self-identified as a “cult actor” or a “B-movie star” and that’s served you pretty well. Considering how much the film business has changed since you got involved in the 1980s, do you think that sort of career pathway still exists for young genre actors? Do we even still have cult actors like we did in the ’80s and maybe ’90s?

CAMPBELL: No.

Why do you think that is?

CAMPBELL: Well, it’s a weird thing! I don’t know. They still had drive-in movies when we were around. And if you were willing to go to the drive to the movies to see this movie … it was harder to be a fan of these cult movies back then. You had to go seek them out and find them. It’s easier to be a fan of things now. You just Google it and find out where your favorite shows are. So, I don’t know. It is a vastly different world. You always had the ground floor. You always had horror movies that could get into movie theaters and drive-ins. That was our way in. That’s really part of why we took the horror route, because it was a way in! You didn’t have to have name actors. The first Halloween … who knew who Jamie Lee Curtis was? Who knew who John Carpenter was? It was a cast full of nobodies. Texas Chain Saw Massacre — who were those people? Nobodies! So that’s how we could get away with it. Then we sort of got into that mode and got stuck there for a while.

Discontinued streams Wednesdays at 9 PM EST on the Maximum Effort Channel on Fubo. The series is also available to watch on Amazon Freevee, LG Channels, Plex, Sling Freestream, Tubi, VIDAA, VIZIO Watchfree+, and Xumo Play.