Dear god, TV executives: Have you no sense of shame? It’s only been two short years since CBS last subjected the venerable Nancy Drew mystery franchise to the ravages of the TV Reboot Machine—that darkly churning clockwork of reimaginings, rejiggerings, and dark televisual necromancy—before ultimately passing on the pilot for Drew, which recreated the beloved teen detective as a world-weary adult cop played by the admittedly badass Sarah Shahi. (Fun fact: This was around the same period that the network was attempting to turn Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn into the heroes of their own public-domain-friendly legal thriller. Heady days.) The next year, NBC tried again, with a weirdly meta take on the franchise that would have seen author Carolyn Keene—not a real person, by the way—solving murders with the help of the childhood friends she based “her” characters on. That…also didn’t make it, on account of it being pretty palpably nuts.
But now, The CW apparently finds itself in need of some extra reserves of girlish pluck, and so the classic YA series is being revived yet again, this time at the hands of Gossip Girl creative team Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz. Written by The Magicians’ Noga Landau, the Schwartz and Savage series will see an 18-year-old Nancy—good start!—dealing with life in the immediate aftermath of graduating from high school.
The series would see her getting ready to head to college, but then, obviously, a murder happens, some dark secrets come up, emotional entanglements, etc. It is, in other words, Riverdale But It’s Nancy Drew This Time, but hey, you know what? We can’t even bring ourselves to be mad about that, since it at least kind of makes sense in terms of what you’d do with the Nancy Drew IP while making a TV show in 2018. Like, at least it’s not set in space, and at this point, that represents forward progress.