Our new Executive Producer Gary Scott Thompson has been spilling the beans about the direction the series will take when it returns in the fall, and it looks like there will be a lot of changes. Thompson compares his Knight Rider series to one of the best shows currently on TV, Battlestar Galactica (also originally created by Glen A. Larson).
“We’re determined to not have another Bionic Woman,” Thomspon said, referencing the failed series revival NBC undertook last year. He also sees the new series as a separate entity from the recent TV-movie: “There’s the original series. There’s the two-hour movie. And now there’s the new series.” Plot points from the movie will form a strand in the new show, but the new staff basically intend to start over. Thompson has hired writers from Lost, Prison Break, Smallville, Walker, Texas Ranger and Charmed.
Cutting to the chase: Justin Bruening will return as Mike Traceur, and the rest of the team — Deanna Russo, Sydney Tamiia Poitier and Bruce Davison — will also be onboard. Val Kilmer will continue as the voice of K.I.T.T. Thompson was coy about the possibility of David Hasselhoff returning as Michael Knight.
K.I.T.T. will still be in the form of the Shelby Mustang, but there will be some big changes when the new Knight Rider goes episodic. “K.I.T.T. is still the Shelby,” says Thompson. “But the ‘Attack Mode’ is completely different. We’re going to see a lot of cool stuff. A thousand times cooler than the morphing we’ve seen before. As my kid said, ‘Big deal, our car can talk.’ “Yeah, but can it do this? Or that?’ It’s the ‘do that’ that will be different.”
“There will also be a new base —- a top secret lab, a K.I.T.T. cave -— that will be super-awesome,” Thompson says. There is a possibility that both the original series semi-trailer and the airplane from the film will return in some form as well.
And…
“The Turbo Boost… yeah, we’re still trying to figure out exactly how to make that work. It’s one of the reasons why I watched as a kid, and loved to see that car jump. But also it’s problematic in terms of jumping a car. They get destroyed when you do it and Ford’s not going to give us an infinite amount of cars.
“We’re doing an hour movie every week. We want the ‘wow’ factor.”
So do we, Mr. Thompson, so do we!
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