NBC Picks Up New J.J. Abrams' Series

NBC has made its first pick-up for the 2010-2011 TV season by acquiring Undercovers, a new spy series created by J.J. Abrams and Josh Reims. The series stars Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a married couple who thought their careers in the CIA were over, until they are recalled to duty. According to Variety, Undercovers is being produced at Warner Bros. Television.

Abrams has created or co-created a number of TV series including Felicity, Lost, and Fringe, and has directed Mission Impossible III and the 2009 Star Trek. Abrams also created a previous “spy” series, Alias, which debuted on ABC in 2001 and spawned comic books, trading cards and other merchandise.

"V" Returns to Primetime

Variety is reporting that ABC is developing a new adaptation of the 1980s science fiction miniseries V that is being written by Scott Peters, the co-creator and executive producer of The 4400. Warner Bros. Television, which produced the two original V miniseries and the V weekly series that aired 1984-1985, is behind the development of the new V as well.

The original V miniseries was an allegory of the holocaust and Nazi Germany, but Peters told Variety that he won’t be duplicating that concept, though “the new V will still focus on what happens when the masses have blind faith in their leaders,” and it will still open with shots of enormous fleets of alien spacecraft hovering over the world’s major cities.

The new series will center on a Homeland Security agent and her troubled son who becomes fixated on the aliens, though as was the case in the original V mini-series there will be a number of different plotlines revolving around various different characters both human and alien. Peters' new V series has nothing to do with the failed 2003 attempt to revive the property in a V: The Next Generation project that was created by Kenneth Johnson, the writer-producer-director of the original V miniseries.

The final episode of the first V miniseries scored a mammoth 40 share in the TV ratings and the series spawned a lot of merchandise ranging from an 18-issue comic book series from DC to lunch boxes, action figures, prop replicas and novels.