In the increasingly depressing network television landscape, this is what passes for creative thinking: Fox has ordered an hour-long pilot for a new Lethal Weapon series. Damon Wayans Sr. will star as Roger Murtaugh (played by Danny Glover in the movies), and we don’t know who will take on Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs role. Fox is hardly alone in their wild compulsion to reboot old movies and TV shows (The X-Files and The Exorcist are the most recent examples) but they may be the most egregious.
The cynical tone here is not because the show will inevitably be bad. Who knows? It could be good. Probably not, but stranger things have happened. No, our fatigue with network TV stems from the lack of fresh ideas, and the rampant fear of taking a chance on new talent. It seems like the brain trust at places like Fox take such a dim outlook on good TV that discussions of future projects inevitably devolve into “hey, what movies did we like as kids?” This is the definition of “retrogressive.”
No premiere date has been announced.