FROM TWD NEWS: RE-PAVING 'STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO'

I'm on vacation, and so there won't be many posts for Inner Toob. And that's mostly because it's been a year since I had to use a dial-up laptop and I'm definitely spoiled by the big system I now have in Toobworld Central. THIS IS DRIVING ME CRAZY!

So the daily Tiddlywinkydink will be a news item with a Toobworld viewpoint. And if I can fit in other short items of interest, I'll give it a shot. But just so's ya know, I'll be saving up the Hat Squad tributes for when I get back to Toobworld Central so that I can give them the attention they deserve. (So far, that would be for Isaac Hayes and George Furth.)

So here's the first of the TWD news items:

CBS is prepping a remake of the 1970s ABC cop show 'The Streets Of San Francisco'. Unfortunately, it's going to be a full remake, instead of a sequel, which would have been better for Toobworld's purposes. (And of course, there's not a suit out there at the networks who are concerned with that!)

A sequel would have meant that the series would have been working the same milieu as the original series, but with actors playing new characters at the same precinct as Detectives Stone and Keller once did thirty years before.

Michael Douglas' role of Steve Keller was killed off, but Mike Stone is still around - so long as Karl Malden is drawing breath. But of course, like Malden himself, Stone would be over 80 years old and probably retired for as long as twenty years at least.

But if this new version of 'Streets' were to be a sequel, Karl Malden could have been brought back in to help launch the new series. Perhaps he could have been consulted in the debut episode because one of his past cases has some bearing on the current one being investigated.

But instead, Sheldon Turner and Robert Port are writing the series up to be about modern-day versions of Mike Stone and Steve Keller. And therefore, that means the show will have to be relegated to the dimension of TV remakes when it debuts.

Turner thinks the times in which both versions of the show are set are similar. "It was the Vietnam War in the 1970s and the Iraq War now," he said. "There is the same sort of tension between generations, and we wanted to carry that to the new series."

Had this been a sequel, they could have turned the relationship between the older cop and the younger on its head. Have the older cop be the liberal, a veteran out of the 70s; while the younger cop would be the more conservative, perhaps even a veteran of the Iraq war. I'm currently watching 'Generation Kill' on HBO, and if the guys in Bravo company were the norm, then that conservative streak would have carried on through their lives post-war.

But these are going to be new versions of Stone and Keller, so the older cop will be the conservative and the younger cop the liberal.

My blogging buddy Joe Bua had a great suggestion - make the younger cop gay. It's a new century and would certainly give the show a twist that would make it stand out from others. Otherwise, what really sets this show apart from any other cop show out there on the air today. The way it sounds to me, this will be a retro show. And as such, we might even hear the creaks of the show's age hidden underneath.

BCnU!
Toby O'B