
(Plus, while breaking and entering in the name of a hunch might be cute for a charming child, for a young woman there could be-and on this show often are-some unfortunate legal ramifications.)ĭespite these changes, Nancy Drew is still very clear on who, precisely, their heroine is and what kind of story the show is telling. And the show is pretty honest about the ways that growing up as a famous child detective prodigy would most likely damage a precocious girl who looked to her ability to solve cases as a measure of her own worth. She’s stubborn, cynical, and has a boatload of trust issues. Sure, this Nancy Drew is older and more emotionally messy than the novels’ girl detective could ever have probably have ever imagined herself becoming. Save in one deeply important aspect: Nancy, herself.
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The show isn’t particularly interested in adapting the classic cases from Keene’s novels, and though it’s certainly full of sly in-jokes for readers (the plot of one episode specifically turns on the existence of a hidden staircase), most of this modern Nancy Drew will feel completely unfamiliar to fans of the original books. And rather than feature teen protagonists, Nancy and her friends have been aged up into young adults, allowing them to wrestle with much more adult narrative concerns like sex, marriage, and holding on to a job.

It has multiple characters of color along with significant LGBTQ representation, and even the occasional Bobbsey Twin or two. The story takes place in the creepy, darkly picturesque Maine town of Horseshoe Bay (which never met a weird local festival or folklore-based ritual that it didn’t like), rather than in the book’s vague, nondescript midwestern heartland of River Heights. In this version of the story, ghosts and other supernatural forces are definitely real, and much more likely to be behind the strange noise coming from your attic than a stray cat or a nosy neighbor. So maybe it shouldn’t be as surprising as it is that although The CW’s Nancy Drew (now entering its third season) isn’t exactly what you’d call a strict, by-the-numbers adaptation of the beloved Carolyn Keene novels, that’s one of the absolute best things about it-even if it’s also the thing die-hard purists will find the hardest to embrace. And much like the original, Gossip Girl’s revival follows a cadre of self-involved rich kids, but its story also serves as a deconstruction of the toxicity of social media in general and among teens in particular.
NANCY DREW TV SHOW NETFLIX SERIES
ABC’s new take on The Wonder Years isn’t just trying to capitalize on Boomer and/or Gen-X nostalgia, it balances universal coming of age tropes with stories that are specific to the experiences of Black Americans in the 1960s that the original series often ignored. They don’t really have anything new to say, nor do they provide us with any further understanding of the characters or stories we once loved, seemingly content to simply rehash that which has come before.īut every so often a reboot or remake comes along that genuinely surprises you. Everything old really is new again, and to be honest, it’s kind of exhausting.īecause the problem with many (most?) of these remakes, reboots, and revivals is that, as a rule, they’re merely trying to capitalize on the known quantity of it all without actually doing much in the way of exploring, interrogating, or otherwise reinventing the things the original property (be it a show, a book, or something else) set out to do. Gossip Girl is terrifying a new generation at Constance Billiard over on HBO Max, teen horror staple I Know What You Did Last Summer is getting reinvented as an Amazon Video limited series, and updates on familiar titles like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Clueless, and Cruel Intentions are all in the works.


It’s the reason we’re getting more Dexter, even though the original series had one of the absolute worst endings of any television show ever made. It’s why Sex and the City is, somehow, inexplicably returning to our screens nearly two decades after it first ended. Known quantities are all the rage in our current television landscape.
