Netflix Rebooting Beloved William Shatner Series (but Fans May Not Be Happy)

Netflix has officially secured the rights to the 1980s police procedural T.J. Hooker, but the reboot won’t look quite like some fans hoped. According to a report by Deadline, Netflix intends to do this story over as a movie rather than a TV show, and it won’t be twisted into a grimdark crime drama. Instead, the reboot will reportedly take an action-comedy approach, inspired in part by the success of The Naked Gun in theaters just this weekend. T.J. Hooker originally ran for five seasons on CBS, and starred William Shatner. It is streaming now on Tubi, but there’s no word on when the reboot might go into production.

Netflix has reportedly hired Jarrad Paul and Andy Mogel to write its feature-length take on T.J. Hooker, with producers Sophie Cassidy, Matt Crespy, Adrian Askarieh, and Alex Westmore. There’s no word yet on who might star in the series, but there are some big shoes to fill here. Shatner played the titular character — a no-nonsense sergeant who was just returning to uniform after losing a partner in the line of duty. He turned his attention to training new recruits played by Adrian Zmed, April Clough, and Heather Locklear.

The stories were often driven by Hooker’s unwavering moral compass and his refusal to compromise. However, the original show relished in violence in a way that likely wouldn’t go over quite as well with today’s audiences. Either the premise will need to shift to accommodate modern sensibilities, or the titular character will be relegated to a comic relief role. Hopefully that balance will be easier to strike in a movie than in a long-running show.

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By network TV standards, T.J. Hooker was actually quite short-lived in its time. With only 91 total episodes, it didn’t reach syndication and isn’t often seen in re-runs today. The show also had a one-hour run-time, which didn’t lend itself to the flexible scheduling of cable in the years that followed. Still, there are some die-hard fans of this series that will be pleased to see it making a comeback four decades later.

As for Shatner, there’s no word on whether the 94-year-old actor will have some role in this remake, but he has given his support to plenty of other sequels and reboots of hsi work over the years. Shatner has gradually reduced his public appearances in recent years, but it’s easy to imagine this as an exception.

There are still a lot of questions to be determined before we see Sgt. Hooker back on the streets of L.A., with no production schedule nor release date so far. In the meantime, the original T.J. Hooker is streaming for free now on Tubi.