Knight Rider (2008)-TCA Report

By Joel Keller,Tv Squad
July 22,2008

Imagine for a second that Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons was hired to run a television show. Now imagine that the television show was a remake of an old favorite. Sounds like it would make for a pretty impatient press tour panelist, right? Well, that's what we got with Gary Scott Thompson, the new show-runner for Knight Rider.

Thompson answered most of the questions on the panel, and his message to everyone was: remember that two-hour KR movie that aired last year? Forget all about it. The characters may be the same but the story is completely different. What went on before probably won't matter for much. Even KITT is a little different.

Co-executive producers Doug Liman and Dave Bartis brought in Thompson, who was a writer for The Fast and the Furious movie franchise, after the two-hour movie was picked up as a series, to bring in a little juice. His goal is to make the show as "fast and furious" as those movies. To that end, he's expanded the cast to create a whole team of people to support Mike Traceur and KITT. Thompson said they'll work from a headquarters called the "KITT cave."

"The idea is to assemble a whole team," said Thompson, somewhat dismissively to a question about the additional cast members. "And it's going to get pretty boring in today's age to watch a guy in a car talk for 43 minutes. No offense to anyone, but we live in an age where you have seen Mission: Impossible, Bourne Identity, the new Batman movies, Iron Man, and the audience wants that, and they are looking for that."

One of the first indications that the movie doesn't matter came when I asked about the scene in the movie when Sydney Tamila Poitier's character wakes up after what seems to be a one-night stand with another woman. Thompson said they haven't explored her sexuality in the series, and Liman continued by essentially belittling my question: "You know, he could take what he wanted from it, but to really feel free to explore his imagination. And having sat in the writers' room with them, the stuff that he's managed to come up with for the episodes that are, you know, the first eight episodes are so imaginative. A question like that almost feels small."

Well, sure it's a small question, but the scene in the movie seemed so gratuitous -- it essentially was a beacon saying "this isn't 1983 anymore" -- that it stuck in a lot of viewers' minds. Poitier told the critics that when she saw the scene in the movie she didn't think it was "a big deal," and that's a great thing. Sure, if they explored it more, it wouldn't have. But it just seemed so thrown in there, it looked like it was put there just to prove something. Anyway, good to see that they're starting from scratch at this point.

KITT is going to be a little different, too, and not just because they upgraded his looks. "The character KITT is evolving. And we've mapped out through 13, through 20, through -- into a second season, actually, already and
what this character is. If I told you everything, I'd be giving up the entire season. But I will pose this question to each and every one of you. Why would you put artificial intelligence into a car? And that's the question we asked ourselves, and it has a bigger answer."

Other tidbits:

• Thompson said that David Hasselhoff has "given his blessing" to the show, but has no plans to participate for the time being.
• 
  
• The first question asked was about the heavy Ford product placement in the movie. "Well, I think there's a big line between them, but unfortunately, it's a show about a car," said Thompson. So you have to have a car. And the idea behind a guy going undercover, you put him in a car that's cool, but also one that could be sitting in a parking lot, and no one would recognize it there, or you could put it onto a car lot. And that's the idea behind it. Look, even Ford said it was way too much in the two-hour, and we are trying to avoid doing that. But we have a Ford car, and we are going to use the Ford product for that car, and that's just because we think the car is cool." The other cars on the roads, though, won't necessarily be Fords, which is at least an improvement from the movie.
• 
  
• How have the characters developed between the movie and series? Well, Deanna Russo, for one, can kick a liite more ass: "In real life we've been doing fight training, weapons training, stunt driving training. So I get to beat up bad guys now. It's pretty cool."

Tags: knight rider, david hasselhoff, kitt, justin bruening, mike traceur, michael knight, remake, tv, entertaiment