Remington Steele Reboot?

[shipperx]

I LOVED this show as a kid. (LOVED!) But...huhhhhh.

This sounds tricky to me.

First, I admit that when I saw the headline I thought it must be a reboot. And, hey, the basic premise always works: "Invented character that a roguish-yet-likable conman takes over and inhabits... until he becomes it for realz".

However, two problems:

1) They would be talking about finding a replacement Pierce Brosnan. It might help if 'Remington Steele' was someone a little less memorable than James Bond. (And I'm a wee bit proud to say that my tween crush was Brosnan rather than someone like a member of Wham!)

2) The premise of the show was that a female detective wouldn't be taken seriously so she invented a fake boss who would be.

Erm... it's not 1983. Why wouldn't a female detective be taken seriously? I mean, yes, sexism still exists (boy howdy) but there are a ton of female detectives now. Remington Steele's Laura Holt predated X-Files Dana Scully, Fringe's Olivia, L&O SVU's Olivia, Bones, etc. What woman now would invent a fictional male boss? And what show can imply that as necessary without it being really insulting?

Then I actually read the article and... bigger huh.

It's a sequel rather than reboot?

Basically it's a detective story with the DAUGHTER of Remington Steele and Laura Holt.

Okay, fine, so she's the daughter of an art thief/con-man that fell for (and mostly went legit for) a straight-laced female private detective. That's a character summary, not a show hook. What they're talking about is Remington Steele without the hook of there ACTUALLY being a con man pretending to be someone who doesn't exist but who eventually becomes the role that he's playing.

This show just sounds like a detective show...

Anyway, from TVGUIDE.COM:

NBC is giving Remington Steele the reboot treatment. The network is developing a half-hour comedy that will act as a sequel to the 1980s series that starred Pierce Brosnan.

The sequel, which will also be titled Remington Steele, will follow Olivia Holt, the daughter of Remington Steele (Brosnan) and Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalist), who reopens the Remington Steele Detective Agency, according to Deadline.

Jay Scherick, David Ronn and Ruben Fleischer are executive-producing, with Scherick and Ronn writing and Fleischer directing.

The original Remington Steele aired on NBC from 1982 to 1987

So... is she going to pretend her parents are part of the agency? Is that the hook? Huh...
(Though I can't imagine that Stephanie Zimbalist would be difficult to come by for a guest spot).

Comments

[spikewriter]

I saw that and was just "No." And a half-hour comedy? There's a recipe for disaster.

If one were doing a reboot, I'd have Steele be her partner, not her boss, a sock puppet she invented for a case and then found out he was useful for social media and things like that. Garnered them some extra attention because the personality is either that classic hardboiled or a Sherlock Holmes type and her thing is that he does the "behind the scenes work". Adds an air of mystery and doesn't diminish her as the boss. Then he walks in, with his blue eyes and mysterious past. And before she knows it, he assumes Remington Steele's identity. He'd have some skills that would be useful, and she's put in a position where revealing the "real" Steele is a sock puppet would cause her some damage. He swears he's not staying forever, just a little while until certain things calm down -- and he doesn't mind making the occasional appearance as Steele, though he often likes to lay low.

At least, that's one idea of how you could do it.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

If one were doing a reboot, I'd have Steele be her partner, not her boss, a sock puppet she invented for a case and then found out he was useful for social media and things like that.

That could work. Say she needed someone with some weird niche qualification like Black Ops or an Ivy League background , and he faked a connection to Oxford and MI5 A corporate espionage thief could perhaps fake MI5.(not that he'd HAVE to be British... it just never hurts. ;)

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

To the sequel? No. But I adored that series & had such a crush on Pierce Bronsan that I think I watched everything he was in, particularly areally good Irish thriller that he did at that time. I even own the first season on DVD. But Bronsan & zimbalst were apparently oil & water. But both had family members guest star.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Brosnan was a my HUGE tween crush. I adored Remington Steele.

[usedtobeljs]

Wow, no. Just no.

And I LOVED Remington Steele back in the day.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I know, weird, right?

And Pierce Brosnan was my celeb teen crush. (And I still think my tween-self had good taste. :)

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

I saw that this morning and my immediate reaction was - Oh hell, NO!

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Icon!!

[queenofattolia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it sounds idiotic, just like the Ironside reboot (but to be fair the original Ironside was preposterous, too).

I really liked the original RS, but it was really just GGC's warmup for Moonlighting. He always seemed to pick leads who detested each other, didn't he? Maybe that was the secret to his success.

Anyway, this sounds beyond contrived and I know they're going to cast completely generic leads, so, bleh.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I haven't actually seen an episode of the Ironside reboot.

Did the same folks who did RS do Moonlighting? I liked RS better. (And when Moonlighting went down the tubes it made its characters incredibly unlikable. I hated them both by the time that was done.)

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

And the point of this is....?

The stupidity of these sorts of things is that you can't replicate what made them successful in the first place - which is based largely on the chemistry of the original actors. (Duh, right?)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

And the point of this is....?

Er... money and being 100% out of ideas?

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

In reality I know Hollywood always recycles stuff. Melies made "A Trip to the Moon" and it was popular so Edison made his own version (or the people working in his name). Anytime a silent film was popular it was reproduced by every other studio; which is why Pathe and other studios starting putting their logos onscreen in a very visible place (on the wall or somesuch). Rouben Mammoulian made Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1931 for Paramount Pictures; ten years later MGM's version was a remake of the earlier film, not another adaptation of the novel, and they tried to buy and destroy every copy of the earlier film to avoid (negative) comparisons. And on and on and on.

But for the last thirty years we've been watching remakes and re-whatever the hell they're called of Star Trek and Dukes of Hazzard etc and this material was freakin' thin to begin with, why remake crap? Ah, because people WATCH crap. They pay tons of money to be entertained by it. If audiences demanded original ideas, the studios would have to respond to that.

So we may have only ourselves to blame. We've got the media we deserve.

FYI: I've never watched more than a handful of X-Files eps but I LOVE that Scully icon. (But then I have a great deal of affection for Gillian Anderson, who should get way more work than she does. But she seems to have standards - imagine that.)