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US reboot for The 4400

2004 sci-fi gets a straight-to-series order ...and a few 2021 upgrades.

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2004 sci-fi The 4400 is getting a reboot after The CW announced on Tuesday announced a straight-to-series order.

The original ran for four seasons from 2004 – 2007 and starred Aussies Jacqueline McKenzie & Jenni Baird, Joel Gretsch, Peter Coyote, Billy Campbell and a younger Mahershala Ali.

Ariana Jackson (Riverdale, UnREAL), will oversee the series which follows 4,400 marginalised people who vanished without a trace over the last hundred years and are all returned in an instant, with no memory of what happened to them.

“As the government races to analyse the potential threat and contain the story, The 4400 themselves must grapple with the fact that they’ve been returned with a few… upgrades,” reads the official synopsis, “and the increasing likelihood that they were all brought back now for a specific reason.”

The new version has been in the pipeline for some time,. In 2018 it was to be co-written by Craig Sweeny (Elementary) and Taylor Elmore (Justified), who both collaborated on Limitless.

The 4400 screened in Australia on 10 with a bumper 1.99m premiere …before dropping away quickly. Its final season was relegated to first run episodes at 4am! Don’t think we have forgotten….

Source: TV Line

9 Responses

  1. As a fan of the 4400 I would’ve preferred a revival / continuation with some of the original cast involved. A FB group Bring Back the 4400 got a lot of support from many of the cast members.

    I’m not against reboots but it’s a risk if you annoy the original fans and don’t appeal to a new fan base. I am enjoying Nancy Drew and Roswell but Walker would have been better just to be called Texas Ranger as it doesn’t have any resemblance to the Chuck Norris version.

  2. Rebooting sci-fi can prove risky, as fans of original sci-fi shows get very picky making comparisons.
    ‘V’ is a good example as the original V was well marketed in 1983 and became an inspiration for similar genre shows, the 2009 V reboot with new stars and updated story did not take too long to become another formulaic melodrama to stretch out its 2 seasons and 22 episodes.
    I guess this is standard practice for US studios wanting time slot fillers, I suspect the same may be expected with this The 4400 reboot, especially from CW.

    1. It sure happens a lot in sci-fi. Battlestar Galactica was a good reboot, taking a kitsch show and adding layers. Doctor Who was technically a revival I guess given the continuation of the character, but Russell T. Davies adopted a reboot approach to much success. Agree V didn’t live up to expectations. Still waiting for Logan’s Run….

      1. Totally agree David, I’m up for a reboot of Logan’s Run. One of my all time favorite six-fi series. Perhaps there’s also room for a Space 1999 revival, but I guess it would have to be Space 2099.

  3. This makes no sense whatsoever-after 4 seasons, what was happening and why was well established, unless the makers are going to scrap the scenario and start again, in which case why use the same title? It wasn’t a ‘cult’ show like ‘Firefly’ or even ‘Babylon 5’!

      1. Again, why use the same title?-not a 60s or 70s show but something that finished 13 years ago-there’s only 3 possible things happening-people from the future causing it (which it was), people from a more advanced parallel universe (pretty much the same thing) or aliens.

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