Everything old is new again for the networks’ pilot season
It’s pilot season, when the network TV business is writing, casting and shooting prototypes for dozens of new series, only a handful of which you’ll ever see.
More patience — and less reliance on Nielsen’s traditional viewing measurement as the sole barometer of success — has meant fewer pilots this season and possibly fewer new shows when the major broadcasters announce their fall schedules in mid-May.
Among familiar faces in potential new series are Matt LeBlanc, Candice Bergen, Jenna Elfman and Geena Davis, while Kevin James has an on-air guarantee as a retired cop in a new CBS comedy. Queen Latifah hopes to make her own comeback in Star, a Fox musical series about a girl group from Empire’s Lee Daniels.
Each year can bring fresh trends as programmers vie to tap into pop-culture fads, and a popu- lar (though not always surefire) strategy is to borrow a title (and sometimes more) from a previous movie, TV show or book series, comics or otherwise. CBS’ Rush
Hour is due next week, and even Netfix has tapped into Millennial nostalgia with Full House and
Gilmore Girls sequels. History has shown that such remakes are “a double-edged sword,” says ABC Studios chief Patrick Moran. A familiar title “helps with the launch” but can “raise expectations going in,” he says. So “if the show’s not great, it’s not going to be enough to sustain the series.”
Here’s a look at what else is on tap, and its source material:
MOVIES NBC is plotting a remake of Cruel
Intentions, the 1999 film, that will feature its original star, Sarah Michelle Gellar. (Fox tried a remake once before, but it never got off the ground.) ABC is mulling Time After
Time, based on the 1979 film (and novel) about author H.G. Wells.
Fox is looking at a remake of 1973 horror classic The Exorcist, with Davis among its cast, A TV version of Lethal Weapon, the Mel Gibson-Danny Glover buddy-cop franchise, is also being eyed by Fox.
CBS is piloting Training Day, based on the Denzel Washington film and set 15 years later.
Even CW is getting into the act with Frequency, about a detective who can speak to — and work with — her long-dead dad, based on the 2000 film.
TV
24: Legacy (Fox), a 12-episode reboot of Fox’s real-time action thriller, with Corey Hawkins ( Straight Outta Compton) replacing Kiefer Sutherland in the lead role, is a strong contender. (Sutherland will star in an already-ordered ABC series, Designated Survivor, as an unlikely president).
Prison Break (Fox), reuniting Dominic Purcell and Wentworth Miller (again) as formerly incar-
cerated brothers in an eight-episode sequel already in the works.
MacGyver, a remake of the 1985-92 series about a resourceful secret agent, is a potential new CBS drama starring Lucas Till ( X-Men).
Chicago Justice, this pilot season’s lone current-series spinoff, expands Dick Wolf ’s NBC Chicago franchise with a potential legal series.
And a younger version of daytime’s Dr. Phil, then a trial consultant, will be played by exiting NCIS star Michael Weatherly in Bull, a biographical drama for CBS.
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Riverdale. This possible liveaction CW series promises a “subversive” take on the Archie Comics characters.
Drew, as in Nancy. Sarah Shahi stars as the former juvenile detective, now in her 30s and employed by the NYPD, in a CBS pilot.
Marvel’s Most Wanted (ABC). The latest superhero series is based on Bobbi Morse, aka Mockingbird (Adrianne Palicki).
Emerald City, NBC’s longdelayed limited-series, based on L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz books.