CBS Photo Archive

2. Cagney & Lacey

The 1981-88 female cop show was supposed to star Ann-Margret, Raquel Welch and then Heather Locklear, but a writers strike ruled out rewrites, forcing the studio to go with a more feminist show starring Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly. Now the dynamic flatfoot duo are Sarah Drew (Grey’s Anatomy) and Michelle Hurd (Hawaii Five-O, yet another reboot), working not for NYPD but LAPD under boss Ving Rhames, 58. Daly has said that both she and Gless were considered washed up in Hollywood when the show originated — when she was 35 and Gless 38: “We were basically old news as actresses because of our age. But we became famous instead.” (Daly’s 2017 Spider-Man flick earned about $1 billion.) May this pilot become a series so the same thing happens to Drew, 37, and Hurd, 51.

3. Kung Fu

Frankly, Grasshopper, we wish the 1972-75 original with David Carradine pretending to be a Chinese kung fu monk in the Wild West had starred the guy who pitched this idea to Hollywood, actual Chinese kickbox philosopher Bruce Lee. And we wish Bruce’s son, Brandon, who played Carradine’s son in Kung Fu: The Movie in 1986, had lived to make a series out of it. What piques our interest is that in this Kung Fu pilot episode, the monk/martial artist is a woman, hunting the bad guy who stole her child in 1950s America. In any case, it will be nice to have a hero who heeds her monkish elders.

4. The Twilight Zone

We’ve already seen the 1959-64 Rod Serling original, a four-part 1983 film version (worth seeing for the first part with Dan Aykroyd as a demon and the last, with John Lithgow on a demon-attacked plane) and TV reboots in 1986 and 2002 (with Forest Whitaker). This is the most promising new Zone series ever, though, because it’s from Oscar-winning Get Out auteur Jordan Peele and X-Men: Days of Future Past producer Simon Kinberg.

5. The Jetsons

The original 24 episodes ran for only six months in 1962-63, but after an eternity of reruns (and a few reboots) since, the futuristic clan with a pup named Astro still feels like family. It’s hard to understand how ABC is going to turn the cartoon into a live-action show, set 100 years hence and filmed before a live audience, with sci-fi special effects somehow added to the mix. But if anyone can do it, it’s executive producer Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future).