As further proof Hollywood is out of ideas, FOX is considering a reboot of Starsky & Hutch with, you guessed it, two female leads.
No thank you.
I loved the original series. What made the original show work was Paul Glasier and David Soul, two men who are still great friends today. I can’t see this idea being anything like good.
If you want to make a cop show with two female leads, hey knock yourself out. Here’s a thought, call it Cagney & Lacey.
From the article: “They solve crimes in the offbeat town of Desert City”
Okay, just how offbeat is this allegedly offbeat town?
To be fair, the original was set in the mythical “Bay City”, but yeah. And I guess we’re to assume that the two women are Starky and Hutch’s kids, which also doesn’t really make sense from a timing standpoint. Grandkids maybe.
Jim Henson’s Starsky & Hutch Babies!
Be right back. Working on my new hit song. It’s called “No More Oreos And No More Cop Shows.”
Exactly! But don’t do that either. Just make it two lady cops named anything else that hasn’t been done already.
A S&H reboot MIGHT be OK even with a couple of female leads. Being female doesn’t mean the show couldn’t be decent. The problem would be if the writing was terrible, the show was poorly contrived, and they were aggressively doing a lot of the typical garbage that pollutes so many of these “reimagined for modern audiences” type reboots.
The focus should always be on telling a compelling, good, or fun STORY with solid characters. If you have that then the show can be good. But if the characters and stories are lousy and the show is just another bad-fanfic where myopic writers/actors/producers from LA are just talking about things they like and puking it into a skeleton with a coat of “Starsky and Hutch” tacked on to sell it to the studio then of course it will be a train wreck made for nobody.
But why base it on a 70s concept.
Will there be a Huggy Bear stereotype character?
Maybe a crossover with Velma will give it some new life.
Most important question: Where will they find a Torino these days? 'cuz the show was all about the car. LOL!
One of the ladies will be a car junkie for sure. She’ll have something she’s been working on in the garage to bring out at just the right moment in the show pilot.
Considering one of the showrunners is currently involved in the dumpster fire that is the rebooted Magnum PI, I don’t have high hopes.
Now that you bring this up, I’d like to say that what I dug about the original Magnum PI was its largely non-serialized storytelling, that it didn’t have a big mythology plot looming large over the case of the week.
It’ll never happen in this day and age of television, but I’d like to see a return to this, that this S&H would take that approach, but since they’re “also trying to unravel the mystery behind who sent their fathers to prison 15 years ago for a crime they didn’t commit,” it doesn’t look like that’s in the cards.
Shame, that. That’s what I loved about stuff like The Rockford Files and Columbo : a mythology plot wasn’t key to everything; you were just going on adventures from week to week. And that was enough. [shrugs]
Most 70s and 80s shows were like that. Solve a mystery. Next week, solve a different mystery.
I’d like a nice hybrid approach, the characters don’t “reset” so to speak each week, so there can be some character development, but I’d like to see a return of story-telling that’s not constrained by THE PLOT ARC OF DOOOOOMMMMMMM
SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH
I mean, I love ya, Burn Notice, but I can only take so much week after week after week of “C’MON, SERIOUSLY, GUYS, WHO BURNED ME”
Also, I’m interested to see how they’ll approach the Huggy Bear character for this reboot.
That’s also what I love about Columbo. There was such a lack of continuity, that the same actor could come back several times as several different characters. And the audience was fine with it. The audience loved it. I wish we could go back to that era of TV.
But if you don’t have a single megaplot how will you get the stupid audience to watch it again, optiMSTie! HOW?! Consistently compelling storylines and interesting characters? We’d have to hire real writers for that.
I suspect they won’t even try. Everything will be forensics and techy sort of investigation. I’m trying to think what the last cop/PI show was that used street smarts and informants instead of computers.
So much word to that. I think our last great scream of that era was Law & Order. Yeah, there would have to be some kind of continuity in terms of folks arriving and folks leaving (one way or another) and that kinda thing, but that mostly stood on its own.
It’s kinda weird to see largely non-serialized shows [gestures to S&H] get refitted with the ol’ “THIS IS THE ONE CRIME WE’VE NEVER SOLVED AND WE HAVE TO GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS SHADOWY CONSPIRACY” trope.
Huggy Bear reimagined as a forensic tech would be AWESOME.
THE DEVIL YOU SAY