That’s apparently the thinking over at NBC, where (per Deadline) the classic ’70s detective show is being rebooted with a new pilot, with Boreanaz set to star. And, hey, we get it: Boreanaz has low-key had one of the best runs on TV of the modern era, at least in terms of sheer consistency. (Excepting a single gap year between the end of Angel in 2004 and the start of Bones in 2005, there hasn’t been a season of television where David Boreanaz wasn’t starring on a series since 1997.) That being said, part of us does have some mild doubts about whether the SEAL Team vet will be able to capture one of Jim Rockford’s most beloved traits, i.e., his ability to get the shit convincingly kicked out of him on a fairly regular basis. (Part of what set the original Rockford apart when it debuted back in 1974 was that its formerly incarcerated hero was just as likely to come out on the wrong side of a fight as the right one, with Garner excelling at playing a guy who relied far more on his mouth than his fists.)
The Rockford reboot pilot is being written by Mike Daniels, and produced by Sarah Timberman, Carl Beverly, and Universal Television. The logline for the new series should be pretty familiar to fans of the original show, which ran from ’74 to 1980 (with Garner reprising the role for a number of TV movies for CBS in the 1990s). To wit: “Newly paroled after doing time for a crime he didn’t commit, James Rockford (Boreanaz) returns to his life as a private investigator using his charm and wit to solve cases around Los Angeles, with his charmingly gruff exterior masking a strong moral core. It doesn’t take long for his quest for legitimacy to land him squarely in the crosshairs of both local police and organized crime.”
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