I usually don’t bother reporting casting news on this blog, because I’d end up doing little else, but yesterday came reports that NBC had found actresses to re-create two iconic, if very different, classic-TV roles. In its remake of Prime Suspect, Maria Bello (A History of Violence) will reportedly take on the role of a tough, self-destructive police detective, originated indelibly in Britain by Helen Mirren. And in David E. Kelley’s rethinking of Wonder Woman, Adrianne Palicki (Friday Night Lights), will wield the golden lasso for the title role, immortalized indelibly on lunchboxes in the 1970s by Lynda Carter.
I’m not sure which project makes me more nervous.
On the face of it, both actresses sound like potentially excellent choices. Bello is definitely capable of the kind of raw-nerve performance called for, if the lead of Peter Berg’s Prime Suspect is anything like the brilliant—but alcoholic and often abrasive—Jane Tennison performed by Mirren. And as Alan Sepinwall discusses at length, Palicki is—both in (literal) stature and ability to project both emotion and toughness—obvious-in-retrospect as an American superheroine.
But so much depends on the adaptation. I loved Prime Suspect, which I included on my list of all-time 100 TV shows in 2007, and there’s no reason it couldn’t be reimagined, differently but in the same spirit, for American TV. I just have my doubts, given the kind of dramas it’s produced lately, that NBC is willing to let the heroine of a cop show be as flawed, and sometimes downright unlikable, as Tennison could be at her lowest moments.
As for Wonder Woman: I like the idea of a remake. I was long cheering for Joss Whedon to pull off the long-gestating film project. And as for this series, I have not read the leaked pilot script, which has gotten absolutely derisive reviews all around the Internet. But David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, girls club) creating a plausible woman lead? I could not conceive a worse match of writer and subject if I were writing an Onion headline.
I would be delighted to be proven wrong for my doubts. Maybe we’ll get a good show out of this—maybe, let’s hope, even two. But casting only gets you so far. If the script is wrong, or the reconception too timid, even a superheroine can only do so much.