TNT announces TV adaptation of decade-old Liam Neeson movie Unknown

In 2011, Liam Neeson starred in a movie called Unknown that sounds like so much of a cliché “Liam Neeson movie” at this point that you’d be forgiven for either not remembering it or thinking that it was just a made-up joke example of the kind of movie Liam Neeson makes, but it was a real movie about a man named Martin Harris who wakes up from a coma after a car accident and discovers that some other guy is the real Martin Harris, making Liam Neeson’s character—dramatic pause—unknown. Also he’s being chased by assassins and there’s some kind of international conspiracy. It has a twist at the end that you might be able to guess, or (if you’re anything like a certain pop culture news writer who doesn’t want to break the “royal we” persona of A.V. Club news stories) you may have even seen the movie and had zero memory of it until now because it has an aggressively generic title and premise, but then you started reading the synopsis and you were like “Whoa, the train station! I’ve seen this movie!” and it kind of wrinkled your brain because that’s sort of literally what the movie is about.

Anyway, Liam Neeson has made more than 30 movies since Unknown, many of which were more memorable than it, but something about Unknown refused to be forgotten. Today, TNT announced that it is developing a TV sequel series based on the movie, with Unknown director Jaume Collet-Serra returning, Sean Finegan writing, and both Karl Gajdusek (Stranger Things) and Speed Weed (Arrow) serving as co-showrunners. A press release says the show will be about “a new lead character” who is “thrust into a mind-bending adventure full of twists and turns,” so Liam Neeson and Martin Harris (or, you know, “Martin Harris”) probably won’t be stopping by, but who knows. The beauty of the Unknown franchise is that anything can happen at any point, because everyone is living under a secret, fake identity and also nobody remembers the movie so it doesn’t matter anyway—unless, like some writer with a bad memory of the many movies he has seen—you do remember it now.