The fall TV season is giving audiences several small screen takes on feature films, such as Fox’s Minority Report and CBS’ Limitless, and it sounds like NBC wants to get in on the adaptation game. They’re apparently bringing the world of Taken’s Bryan Mills to TV audiences through a prequel series centered on his life before he started losing family members at an alarming rate. Somebody warn the bad guys!
Not taking long at all to come up with a decision on this project, NBC has already put in a straight-to-series order for Taken’s prequel, meaning they must have a lot of confidence in it. The show doesn’t have a showrunner or a writer yet, but the hunt is currently on, and the project will be a co-production between Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp. and Universal TV. We’re really hoping that Besson and franchise co-writer Robert Mark Kamen are involved in spinning these new stories, as Besson needs to have a direct presence on television.
Details about the series are slight, but according to Deadline, the timeline for this pre-Taken – or Still There and Stuff, if I may – will find series lead Bryan Mills as a young man who is not yet married and has no children. As a nod to the character’s speech from the first film when he brings up his “particular skills” that he’s culled together over a long career, the show will likely see him as a CIA operative who is going about acquiring that very same skill set that helped him save his family in the three feature films. However, don’t expect to see Mills dealing with the CIA of the 1970s and 1980s, as the series will be set in the modern day, which doesn’t make any sense, but whatever.
The Taken trilogy were extremely successful at the box office, although critics weren’t as kind to the sequels, and they effectively jumpstarted the age-defying Liam Neeson’s career once more as an action star. It doesn’t seem like Neeson would be involved in this project at all, but since they’re not sticking to any kind of logistical timeline, there’s nothing stopping the actor from joining the show as the guy who teaches Mills the skills. Who better to instruct future Liam Neeson on how to kill people than Liam Neeson?
This is the latest example from Luc Besson’s filmography to get spun into a TV series. We’ve already seen La Femme Nikita some years back, and then there’s Transporter: The Series. But knowing how ridiculously action-oriented NBC’s upcoming series The Player is, I have a feeling that a Taken show might be the most exciting port of Besson’s work yet.
