A former Arrow star will be making a return to The CW but not in the way you suspect. The network will be reimagining 2004’s USA Network sci-fi drama, The 4400, and has announced the show’s first cast members, with a very familiar face.
Joseph David-Jones, who portrayed John Diggle, Jr./Connor Hawke in the final season of Arrow, will join newcomer Khailah Johnson in the new drama, which has gotten a straight-to-series order by The CW, and will be titled 4400, per Deadline. The show's synopsis reads like this:
4400 overlooked, undervalued, or otherwise marginalized people who vanished without a trace over the last hundred years are all returned in an instant, having not aged a day and with no memory of what happened to them. As the government races to analyze the potential threat and contain the story, the 4400 themselves must grapple with the fact that they’ve returned with a few upgrades, and the increasing likelihood that they were all brought back now for a specific reason.
The Arrow alum will play Rev Johnson, a man of faith and compassion, who was raised in a powerful and affluent church family but disappeared in the 1990s. Rev Johnson is accustomed to the power and clout afforded by his position, and he will emerge as a natural leader among the 4400. Khailah Johnson, meanwhile, will play Ladonna, a high maintenance Miami party girl who disappeared on her 21st birthday. Ladonna comes across as spoiled and vapid at first but will end up tapping into her own potential in ways she never expected.
The 4400 originally ran on USA Network from 2004-2007 for four seasons, totaling 44 episodes. The series centered around a group of 4400 people in the Cascade Range foothills near Mount Rainier, Washington who disappeared in a beam of white light in or after 1946. None of them aged from the time of their disappearance and have no memories of what transpired prior to their return. It had an ensemble cast, consisting of Mahershala Ali, Samantha Ferris, Jenni Baird and Billy Campbell, among others.
Besides Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Joseph David-Jones has starred in the recurring role of Clayton Carter on Nashville, as Hollis in The Divergent Series: Allegiant and as Morris in Detroit. Meanwhile, Khailah Johnson is a senior at Carnegie Mellon University and made her professional debut last summer in the Muny’s production of Footloose.
The CW is known for spinoffs, adaptations and reboots, and the network even recently announced a live-action Powerpuff Girls reboot starring Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. star Chloe Bennett, former Disney star Dove Cameron, and Broadway’s Yana Perrault. The network’s newest reboot, Walker, which stars Jared Padalecki as the Texas Ranger, has already been renewed for a second season.
There is no other news yet on 4400 but if it’s anything like the original, it will be a good one!
