After 85 years of sleuthing, Nancy Drew is to be reincarnated once more for the telly. CBS is reimagining the gutsy heroine as an NYC detective in her 30s, snooping around modern-day New York and invariably solving everything.
This is a welcome transformation: three television series and five feature films starring Nancy already exist, and the NYPD ranks are no place for a little girl.
Numerous attempts to capture the namby-pamby tribulations of a teen gumshoe on screen have failed, and their failings are reminiscent of the original printed stories. The books first appeared in the 1930s, but by the late 1950s they were shortened into dime novels.
This involved the extensive revision of all works to remove an abundance of racial stereotypes, a task that conveniently saved money on printing costs. Everyone was a winner, apart from certain fans who felt the unrivalled magic of political incorrectness was lost.
The longest-running TV rendition of Drew lasted two years in the 1970s. The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries dropped Nancy entirely by the third season (saving money on title-credit costs) and soon after got cancelled entirely. Reappearing as Girl Detective in 2004, Drew solved crimes with the help of her trusty hybrid electric vehicle and cell phone. As an homage, the new CBS series would do well to feature a throwback cameo role from a Hardy Boy or Nokia 3310.
Nancy’s original creators wanted to create an independent girl character “who could do the same things as boys”; a controversial prospect then; still hotly contested by some today (the current year being 2015).
Thankfully the tide is still gradually turning, as exemplified by the Netflix genre category titled "Featuring A Strong Female Lead". Being the original strong female lead, there's hope that Nancy Drew might finally be watchable.
