Alice Eve to star in Early Edition reboot pilot for CBS
The original series starred Kyle Chandler as a guy who got tomorrow's newspaper today
Alice Eve has signed on to star in the pilot for CBS’s upcoming revival of ’90s supernatural drama Early Edition, in which she’ll be tasked with the seemingly fantastical responsibility of trying to explain to people in 2022 what a newspaper is.
Wait, no: Eve will actually be gifted a copy of tomorrow’s newspaper today, much as Kyle Chandler was lo so many years before, and thus get stuck trying to figure out how to prevent all the tragedies that crop up on the front page. One twist, though, is that Eve’s character Beth will be closely connected to the news herself—as a producer for a Seattle news station, she’ll have to balance her own desire for scoops with the needs imposed by her supernatural duties.
The Early Edition reboot is being headed up by Melissa Glenn, whose last big credit was a writing/producing role on CBS’s Zoo, the TV show in which all animals fight all human beings. The original series was created Ian Abrams, Patrick Q. Page, and Vik Rubenfeld, and, while it would probably be inaccurate to say it launched Chandler to superstardom—he won a Saturn Award for that one, not a Coach Taylor-style Emmy—it was a well-received spin on light TV supernatural drama from 1997 to 2000.
The new series, like the original, is being aimed at CBS. Eve, meanwhile, has been working pretty extensively in TV of late; she’s currently in post-production on supernatural thriller The Power for Amazon Prime Video, and is still (relatively) fresh off Julian Fellowes’ 2020 period drama Belgravia. No word yet on who’ll be joining her for the pilot—the logline mentions a news mentor who pushes her to consider the human element of her stories—or, more importantly, what kind of cat will be chosen to deliver the paper to her every day.