24 Reboot Coming To Fox With Black or Latino Lead
When actor Kiefer Sutherland announced a few months ago that he was done with the action/terrorism drama 24 and he wouldn't be appearing in any reboots or spin-offs, I wondered if that was the last we'd hear about a possible new version of the show. But Fox has refused to give up on the idea, and at the Television Critics Association press tour, Fox Television Group Chairman and CEO Dana Walden revealed that a reboot is on the way and it has an official title: 24: Legacy.
“We’re ordering a pilot set in the world of 24,” Walden said. “We’ve thought about doing a sequel to this for a long time. After the final event series, we saw the real time format could work in a 12-hour format. Evan Katz and Manny Coto had a fantastic idea for a reboot. It’s very reminiscent of their original. Stephen Hopkins is going to direct 24: Legacy.”
“The pilot was just ordered so in terms of casting, we’ve had conversations with the producers but we’re not out to an actor,” Walden said. “The lead is Eric Carter. He is clearly a significant focus of the show. There’s also a female co-lead who is a former head of CTU. It doesn’t feel like it is fully replicating the original in terms of how much Jack Bauer carried by himself, but it’s a very prominently featured lead.”
So Sutherland's Jack Bauer won't be coming back, and apparently neither will Mary Lynn Rajskub's tech genius character Chloe. But will any other character from the show appear in the new version?
“Never say never, but right now not,” she said. “There’s a time jump. This is a new organization. It’s a new CTU, a new cast of characters. It’s a completely different stories in terms of this special ops group we’re focusing on. It’s a very contemporary story about the potential to activate sleeper cells in the United States and radicalize Americans. There are nods in the pilot to prior CTU agents. There are a couple photos that will feel reminiscent of the original but no ongoing characters.”
Walden also revealed that the new lead character, Eric Carter, "was originally conceived as being a diverse actor" so the character could be "as different from Jack Bauer as possible," so they're currently looking at black and Latino actors to fill that role.
This is going to be another 12-episode series instead of the full 24, because the network realized with 24: Live Another Day that stories like this could be told in a condensed timeline without needing to rely on an extended episode count. Frankly, that's a much better thing for the fans, because stretching the show out into 24 episodes often resulted in bonkers subplots that were needed to fill time and ultimately hurt the show on a creative level. We'll see how 24: Legacy does without its original cast, and whether it's something people are still willing to tune in to watch. What do you think?
Via: /Film