The recently renamed Sonar Entertainment (formerly RHI)—like the revitalized MGM and Miramax before it—has decided that the best way to stake its claim on the future is to dig out the past, a metaphorical groping under the couch cushions that has already turned up a franchise dust bunny in a Hellraiser TV show and now, a perfectly good public domain property that no one was using: Allan Quatermain. The Hollywood Reporter says that Sonar has teamed with Ecosse Films—makers of the Starz drama Camelot—to create a new 10-part series starring the H. Rider Haggard-created adventurer who inspired Indiana Jones (as well as several generations of men who believe they can pull off fedoras) as he’s hired to find the missing brother of a German nobleman amid King Solomon’s lost diamond mines.
Writers Richard Kurzi and Bev Doyle (who previously adapted Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal) will draft the new incarnation of the swashbuckling character who’s been portrayed on film by actors as varied as Stewart Granger, Sean Connery, and Patrick Swayze, plus a pair of Richard Chamberlain/Sharon Stone movies that spurred the United Kingdom to stop talking to us for a few years. Promisingly, this new version is seeking an actual British person to play Quatermain, so should it be a success, you can probably soon expect a CBS copycat where he’s, say, a recovering alcoholic cop searching for a fabled lost neighborhood in Detroit.