A 'Nancy Drew' Reboot Series Is Coming To NBC
Break out your magnifying glasses: Nancy Drew is getting remade for TV. Again.
The OG intrepid teen girl detective will be the star of a Nancy Drew reboot from NBC, a year after CBS turned down a series order of Drew, a procedural loosely inspired by the mystery novels. The same team behind Drew, Tony Phelan & Joan Rater and producer Dan Jinks, will be reworking the story idea for a brand new NBC TV series.
According to Deadline, the NBC Nancy Drew series will be taking a page from the CBS series, which followed the adult author of the Nancy Drew mystery books who based the novels on her childhood adventures — which causes a rift between her and her two best friends, who she had turned into sidekicks.
Deadline describes the NBC series idea:
In NBC's Nancy Drew, written by the duo, when the author of the most famous female teen detective book series is thrust into a real-life murder mystery, who does she turn to for help? Her two best friends from childhood, who were the inspiration for all those books and the women who have a real ax to grind about the way their supposed best friend chose to portray them all those years ago.
The CBS series had gone all the way to pilot starring Sarah Shahi before being nixed by the network for reportedly "skewing too female" (um, what?), but Phelan and Rater, who later developed the Katherine Heigl-starring series Doubt, were so attached to the story that they shopped it to other networks.
"We did a pilot and we tried to forget about it but we couldn't; we loved the characters so much," Rater said. "But we knew that we had to come up with a different way to go about it."
So there will be no headband-wearing precocious teens solving mysteries in this series. It's about real life now. Which is unfortunate, because the biggest appeal of Nancy Drew was how her youth and gender caused people to underestimate her, to their consternation. True, a teen actress is often hit-or-miss, especially in television where teen characters are unreasonably hated, so it's a safer bet to follow adult amateur detectives with adult problems — now dealing with ageism on the other side of the spectrum. But as a girl growing up and reading the Nancy Drew books, she provided a comforting role model for me and I would love to see her brought to life on screen — though preferably not as Emma Roberts in a cheesy family-friendly version.
Oh well, at least we'll always have the most loyal (though decidedly more hardboiled) TV iteration of Nancy Drew – the late, great Veronica Mars.