The Blues Brothers may become a TV show starring a Blues Brothers tribute act

By Sean O'Neal | August 31, 2011 | 3:03pm

Aux Features TV

In the spirit of Ghostbusters 3 and your 45-year-old coworker who keeps handing you flyers for his cover band, The Blues Brothers could be making yet another return to the stage, this time as a weekly TV series. No doubt inspired by the government’s surprisingly generous Belushi Tax Credit program, John Belushi’s widow Judy has written a script with the help of Saturday Night Live writer (and Square Pegs creator) Anne Beatts, as well as the input of Wayne Catania and Kieron Lafferty—a.k.a. the Jake and Elwood Blues of the “World’s Greatest Blues Brothers Tribute” act, which has been entertaining cruise ship, casino, and corporate picnic audiences for years now. According to their website, Catania and Lafferty’s “Official Blues Brothers Revival” is “sanctioned by Dan Aykroyd,” because of course it is, and “as a result they can entertain you as the Blues Brothers (Revival) performing live to track or accommodating your needs,” whether it be a wedding reception, minor league baseball game, or network television show.

Aykroyd—whose reverence for The Blues Brothers was last expressed by having first Jim Belushi and then John Goodman put on his dead partner’s costume and just carry on like everything was normal—will also co-star in the show should it get picked up, playing “the voice of Jake and Elwood’s parole officer,” and thus handing the characters off to some of that “new blood” for which he’s suddenly so thirsty. The plot will involve the orphaned Elwood searching for his biological dad, and naturally it would involve lots of singing: “It would be Route 66 meets Glee, and it all goes to hell in a handbasket,” Beatts said. Though presumably she means that the plot would frequently go awry and devolve into shenanigans, not that we would all be dragged into a hellish world where everything we once loved is broken and twisted beyond all recognition by relentless franchising.