A ‘Swift’ spinoff: ‘Nancy Drew’ crew stars in new CW series
There are certain characters who burst onto the television screen and command attention from their very first scene, and it immediately becomes apparent that they deserve a series of their own. For fans of CW’s “Nancy Drew,” this is the case with Tom Swift (Tian
Richards, “The Quad”), who leads his own self-titled series as of Tuesday, May 31, on the same network.
Audiences familiar with “Nancy Drew” will remember billionaire inventor Tom from his appearance in the Season 2 episode “The Celestial Visitor,” in which he enlists Nancy’s (Kennedy McMann, “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”) help to find the meteorite that crashed into their town 90 years earlier. The purely science-driven Tom quickly finds his beliefs tested as he encounters more than he bargained for in the form of the supernatural, but finds a friend in Nancy as well as the courage to come out to his father, Barton (played in “Tom Swift” by Christopher B. Duncan, “Black Lightning”).
Now it’s Tom’s turn to take the spotlight.
The character, who first appeared in the 1910 novel “Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle,” was first portrayed as a brilliant teenage inventor fascinated by the rapidly evolving science and technology of the times. Created by Edward Stratemeyer, whose publishing house also produced the Nancy Drew book series, the Tom Swift novels were written by many ghostwriters who published under the pseudonym Victor Appleton. To date, there are over 100 books featuring Tom and his son,Tom Swift Jr., the most recent of which was published in March 2022.
The upcoming series reimagines Tom as a gay Black man, a far cry from his first appearance as a straight white man over a century ago.
“The original Tom Swift was great for his time and what he represented,” Richards told TVLine last year. “At the time, that was the face of young boys, all-American kids full of possibilities. But in 2021, that can look so different. It can look like someone like me — a Black guy who is chocolate, who is queer, who is all those things that we’re told aren’t the normal or the status quo.”