This is happening. From BBC News:
Cult classic sci-fi series Blake’s 7 is to be remade for the Syfy network, it has been announced.
FremantleMedia International said 13 hour-long episodes will be written by Heroes writer Joe Pokaski.
It added, in a statement, that Casino Royale and Goldeneye director Martin Campbell was also on board.
The original series, which ran on the BBC between 1978 and 1981, followed the exploits of a group of renegades and convicted criminals.
…
According to FremantleMedia, the new series will be set in 2136 and will “tell the story of seven criminals – six guilty and one innocent – on their way to life on a prison colony in space, who together wrestle freedom from imprisonment”.
It continued: “They acquire an alien ship which gives them a second chance at life and become the most unlikely heroes of their time”.
I don’t have an entire dream cast in mind, but I do have one essential pairing: I’d love to see Benedict Cumberbatch as evil sexy bastard Kerr Avon (originally played by Paul Darrow) and, yup, Martin Freeman as Vila Restal.
If we’re stuck with this, we might as well have fun with it while we can.
I’ve been hearing about this for a while, and I keep being surprised that it makes it through the various hurdles on the way to production. I’ll be very surprised if they keep any of the feel of the original – which was after all made in part as a response to the shininess of Star Trek and other TV SF, the original “darker re-imagining” twenty-five years before its time.
So I’ll place a small bet: there will be more American Revolutionary War and/or American Civil War references in the pilot episode than there will be shout-outs to British dystopian SF.
I thought they’d already rebooted Blakes 7?
Granted, they called it Farscape, but I thought they did a reasonable job, in the circumstances.
I never got into Blake’s 7: the plotting of the first episode was “plodding” and at one point a guard was bribed with a plastic bracelet in a society where everything looked to be paid via credit card. The illogic of it turned me off right there. Following episodes may have been better… but I didn’t see how that would have worked out.
The first episode is horribly, horribly, deadly dull. Terrible way to introduce anyone to the show! The protagonists seem to be Blake’s earnest & well-meaning lawyers, who investigate his semi-hysterical claims that he’s a rebel and not a child molester (which is what he’s been accused of, as the Federation doesn’t want him to be a martyr to the cause.) Like Farscape, it took about a season for them to find their space-legs.
My first episode was a “Rumours of Death” grainy camera-copy (Brits would literally have to point their videocameras at the screen to tape the episode to make a copy that their American friends could watch.) I became a stone fan after that and went on to serve on con-coms of several B7 fan cons, finally graduating to co-chair of my own fan-run convention years later. Madness! But fun!
The sets are crap, the costumes are often crap (esp in the first season when they had to buy their costumes in a local army/navy store). Sometimes the scripts are fab and sometimes they’re crappity-crap-crap to the point where one of the actors said, “They’re making fun of us!” and refused to sign up for the next season. But the characters are great; they’re not happy-joy-joy “like me” characters. They’re complicated and painted in shades of gray, and they often get great lines of dialogue that the Shakespearean-trained actors really enjoy ripping into. Terry Nation, the creator of the Daleks and one of the many people who had a hand in the creation of original Dr. Who, created B7, and it, like the many Dalek scripts he wrote, is often very dark, but also often very wryly funny, too.
It’s a lot like classic Dr. Who in its “yeah, it’s crap but we love it” aspect.
I always loved the first episode because it succeeded in being both a pilot of a series – its execution of the dysopian future is briliant – and being a character peice.
And it takes balls to write your protagonist, your hero, as a convicted paedophile.
You should have caught further shows, since the first story isn’t really over until a few episodes later, and you deprived yourself of some good stuff.
Your idea of a Cumberbatch & Freeman recast is pure, unadulterated genius. GENIUS! Alas, they are probably both too famous now to deign to accept these roles, they had to get ’em at the point in their careers where they were willing to accept the roles of Holmes & Watson on a TV show. ;)
From the description, it sounds like a reboot, so it looks like the idea that Paul Darrow would play elderly (sorry, Paul!) leader to a new crop of cannon-fodder has been passed over. I’m not unhappy about that, I do think a reboot, much as Battlestar Galactica got a reboot, is a good idea. Since it seemed unlikely that BSG would make a decent reboot and it turned out to be (often) beautifully done, I’m just going to sit back and cross my fingers that they don’t screw the pooch on this one.
It’s really down to whether or not the show’s rebooters are A) talented story-tellers and filmmakers and B) fans of the original. I really think you need both to get a good reboot, just the one or the other is not enough. I loved the opening episodes of Heroes, the problem was they decided to go the Lost route and spin out their story to boring lengths, plus they constantly kept tossing in new characters we didn’t care about instead of pursuing the stories of the characters we loved. And of course they constantly made very bad and non-organic choices for the plot that made everyone say, “well, that was a waste of time” at the end of the season. No idea if Pokaski was part of the problem or the one guy yelling, NO, THAT’S NOT A GOOD IDEA in the Heroes story-meetings; let’s hope the latter!
(edited to fix two typos)
Blake: Mandy Patakin (probably spelled that wrong)
Avon: Burn Gorman or John Simm
Cally: Being Human’s Leonora Chrichlow
Vila: Arthur Darville
Servelan: Lesley Sharp or Casenova’s Nina Sosyana
Maybe it’s just because the character she plays on Game of Thrones is so similar, but I’m thinking Lena Headey would make an excellent Servalan.
That’s true enough… but my word, wouldn’t she be excellent as Cally? (I’m thinking of her turn in The Sarah Connor Chronicles here.)