Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios, said that the network took the lessons it learned the hard way from its failed reboot Bionic Woman and applied them to the upcoming remake of Knight Rider.
Bionic Woman started off well, then sputtered out creatively and in the ratings, and it was not renewed for a second season. NBC conceded that the rush to get the show on air ultimately hurt it.
Moving forward with Knight Rider after the success of a backdoor pilot that aired in February, the network elected to take its time with the weekly version, a sequel to the original 1980s series that starred David Hasselhoff.
“We saw it with [Fox's] Terminator [The Sarah Connor Chronicles], and we saw it with Bionic Woman: big openings, big branded titles, draw open the tent, and the show didn’t deliver on that $10 million pilot,” Silverman said in response to a SCI FI Wire question during the network’s upfront presentation to advertisers in New York on April 2. “What we’re doing with Knight Rider is we consciously delivered it on air [in February] so that we had nine months to make sure that series is great.”
To wit, Silverman said, NBC recently tapped Gary Scott Thompson as the Knight Rider show runner. Thompson most recently was show runner on NBC’s hit series Las Vegas, and he also knows from cars–having scripted The Fast and the Furious–and from SF, having penned the story for Hollow Man.
“We just brought on [Thompson] to be our partner on it creatively,” Silverman said. “We’re hiring a staff. We’re hiring the cast. We’re honing the writing crew. And we’re ensuring that the show lives up to the audience’s expectation. The audience turned on and tuned into the two-hour movie premiere. Now we need to make sure they come in week in and week out, and for that we’ve got to take a rigorous approach.”
Knight Rider will premiere in the fall. (NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.) –Ian Spelling
