New Fall Dramas

TV Drama examines the super producers, franchises and reboots that all feature prominently on the fall grids of the U.S. broadcast networks, alongside several live productions and event miniseries.

The move toward rebooting classic series and movies shows no sign of abating on the U.S. broadcast networks—they are all over the fall season grid this year.

In terms of reboots of previous series, CBS has gone for a redo of MacGyver, with Lucas Till cast as the young “Mac,” using his talent for problem-solving to save lives. FOX, on the heels of the successful The X-Files return, is bringing back Prison Break with its original cast members, including series leads Dominic Purcell and Wentworth Miller. 24: Legacy, meanwhile, takes the revolutionary real-time model of the original 24 and combines it with a new hero, Corey Hawkins as Sergeant Eric Carter, racing to foil a terrorist plot. Kiefer Sutherland, Jack Bauer on 24, is exec producer alongside Howard Gordon and Brian Grazer, among others. (Sutherland, meanwhile, is the lead in ABC’s buzz-generating political thriller Designated Survivor, from uber-producer Mark Gordon and Entertainment One.)

Franchise extensions feature prominently on NBC. Dick Wolf rules the roost with a new Chicago extension, Chicago Justice, adding to his returning hits Chicago P.D., Chicago Fire and Chicago Med, as well as the stalwart Law & Order: SVU. The network also greenlit an extension to The Blacklist called The Blacklist: Redemption, starring Ryan Eggold (“Tom Keen”) and Famke Janssen (“Susan ‘Scottie’ Hargrave”).

Several movies are being spun into TV shows, among them Training Day for CBS, which kicks off 15 years after the events of the acclaimed Antoine Fuqua film. The Warner Bros. Television production features Bill Paxton and Justin Cornwell in the lead roles, with Fuqua among the exec producers. Damon Wayans, Sr. and Clayne Crawford lead the cast of Warner Bros.’s FOX series Lethal Weapon, inspired by the popular Danny Glover-Mel Gibson 1987 film (which spawned three sequels). 20th Century Fox Television is offering a new spin on the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist. FOX has slated that show, starring Geena Davis, in a Friday night slot. EuropaCorp TV partnered with Universal Television to make Taken, focusing on a young Green Beret Bryan Mills (played in the movie franchise by Liam Neeson). That arrives on NBC in 2017. And at The CW, the feature film Frequency has spawned a Wednesday series from Warner Bros.

Also on The CW, Riverdale is based on characters from the Archie Comics universe. It’s the latest from mega producer Greg Berlanti, who is also behind the network’s superhero hits: Supergirl, which moved over from CBS, The Flash, Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.

And speaking of super-producers, Shonda Rhimes continues to reign supreme at ABC. While her Thursday night block has been broken up in the fall with Scandal moving to midseason (to accommodate the pregnancy of series star Kerry Washington), she has a brand-new show on the grid with Still Star-Crossed, a period piece about the lives of the Montagues and the Capulets post Romeo and Juliet.

And Empire’s co-creator Lee Daniels is building an empire of his own on FOX—his new musical drama Star is a midseason replacement on the network.

On the music front there are several live specials: Hairspray! on NBC and The Rocky Horror Picture Show on FOX, among others. The fall season will also include some limited event series, with ABC’s When We Rise from Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black and FOX’s Shots Fired, with a cast that includes Sanaa Lathan, Helen Hunt, Richard Dreyfuss and Stephen Moyer.

For international broadcasters in need of returnable procedurals, the fall announcements offered some good news: the NCIS franchise remains intact, the Criminal Minds spin-off was renewed, the aforementioned Chicago franchise has grown. However, with the CSI franchise now over, Castle gone and Bones nearing the end of its run, buyers will be anxious to see if any of the new story-of-the-week offerings can satisfy the needs of their scripted audiences across the globe.

For a full recap of new and returning series on the fall schedule in the U.S., click here.