This week, Jaime Sommers returned to the small screen with the fairly successful premiere of Bionic Woman. So it seems only fitting that it was reported yesterday that another vintage TV character could be gracing the airwaves some time next year. But who is it? I’ll give you a hint: He has a talking car.
Ok, if that hint wasn’t totally obvious, you were either living under a rock back in the 80’s or you weren’t born yet. Variety recently reported that NBC is bringing back Knight Rider! Interestingly enough, it wasn’t the re-imagining of Bionic Woman that inspired the Peacock to bring back Michael Knight and his talking car, KITT but rather, the success of the summer blockbuster, Transformers.
Variety stated, “Success of "Transformers" had a role in inspiring NBC Entertainment chief Ben Silverman's decision to revive "Knight." The thinking is that smallscreen f/x have advanced to the point where it'd be feasible to have a weekly series in which cars shift shapes.” Doug Liman, who directed The Bourne Identity (and produced the two sequels that followed) has been brought on board to produce the new version of the series.
Variety also suggested that there’s a good chance that we’ll see a “backdoor pilot” for the series sometime this spring. This means that rather than unveiling the new series in the fall, NBC might air an extended pilot episode at some point during the spring season when some of their regularly scheduled shows are on hiatus. It would basically be a sneak preview for the series. We saw something like this last spring when ABC crammed the pilot episode of Private Practice into a “special two-hour episode” of Grey’s Anatomy. In the case of Knight Rider, since this series isn’t a spin-off, its highly unlikely that NBC will try to squeeze the intro Knight’s new story into an episode of Heroes. Although I do think it might make for a hilarious Office episode if Knight and KITT showed up at Dunder-Mifflin. Maybe not.
