Utilizing its particular set of skills—in this case, a talent for noticing that something was kind of popular in the sort-of recent past—NBC has announced that it’s given a straight-to-series order to a TV show based on Luc Besson’s Taken franchise. According to Deadline, the new series will serve as a prequel to the films, with Bryan Mills—a.k.a. Liam Neeson Is Going To Kill You, Ill-Kempt European—demonstrating how he acquired the specific cache of vocational abilities he’s always chummily bragging about with overly chatty kidnappers.
Rather than being a period piece showing off Mills’ “very long career,” though, Taken the TV show will be taking place in the modern day. That implies that one of his oft-mentioned special skills is apparently “being a Time Lord,” since Mills will be having all these wacky prequel adventures several years after his older, more grizzled self murdered a bunch of European dudes in a rampage of rescuing revenge. (Unless the series is secretly a lead-in to a futuristic science fiction Taken reboot, with a cyborged-up Liam Neeson kicking his way across Space Europe to rescue his abducted daughtertron. Which, for the record, we would totally be into.)
Besson is executive producing the series, working with Universal TV and EuropeCorp; his other TV credits include TNT’s ongoing TV adaptation of the Transporter franchise, and The CW’s now-ended Nikita.