As Fast Forever, the eleventh and final Fast and Furious movie, continues to spin its wheels in development, lead star Vin Diesel has shocked fans by announcing that the future of the franchise will lie not on the silver screen, but on the small screen.
“Peacock is launching four shows in the Fast and the Furious universe,” Diesel said at a NBCUniversal presentation on Monday, May 11. No further details were shared at the time, beyond Mike Daniels and Wolfe Coleman writing the pilot for one of the four shows.
However, as a fan of Universal’s Fast and Furious franchise, I cannot help but think that this announcement from Diesel is sadly 10 years too late. The perfect time to have brought the Fast Saga to the small screen would have been after the release of Furious 7.
The time to bring Fast & Furious to TV was 10 years ago
The Fast and the Furious has had an interesting history. It wasn’t until the fifth entry, 2011’s Fast Five, that the franchise found the right mix of action, cars, and family. Fast & Furious 6 doubled down on everything that made Fast Five work, while Furious 7 managed to provide a satisfying conclusion to Brian O’Conner’s story despite Paul Walker’s tragic passing during the middle of its production.
Against all odds, Furious 7 stuck the landing with how it wrote Brian O’Conner out of the franchise narrative. Unfortunately, the franchise has never truly recovered from losing Walker, with his absence being felt in the subsequent three sequels — The Fate of the Furious, F9, and Fast X — even with the movies trying their damndest to come up with a good enough reason to explain why Brian wouldn’t immediately jump back into action to help Dom and the rest of his friends. If his wife Mia can risk her life despite the family they’ve built together, why can’t Brian?
That’s why Fast & Furious should have gone to the small screen 10 years ago, with projects that didn’t need to explain why Brian wasn’t around. Diesel revealed in 2015 that major character-centric spin-offs were in development, which would have been the best way forward for a franchise that ultimately grew bigger and more outlandish until it did its version of “jumping the shark” by shooting a car into outer space.
What also makes the Peacock announcement surprising is that the Fast franchise is in an entirely different place than it was a decade ago. In 2015, the franchise was at the height of its popularity with Furious 7. Fans would have welcomed a spin-off film or series. I know I certainly would have been thrilled at bingeing a Fast & Furious series on Netflix or Prime Video.
But now, in 2026, not only has the franchise’s critical reception declined, but so has the box office. That’s proof alone that the audience and fan interest just isn’t there anymore. While I consider Fast X to be a vast improvement over the previous two films (and the Hobbs & Shaw spinoff), at this point, I just want to see the franchise I’ve grown to love be brought to a satisfying conclusion with Fast Forever, not extended with unnecessary spin-offs.
So, I’m sorry, Diesel, but I don’t think there’s any more milk left in the cash cow that was Fast and Furious. You’ve gotten to live your life a quarter mile at a time for 25 years, but now it’s time to push the franchise past the finish line for good.
