The first question some of us had when we learned that CBS has ordered a pilot for an Early Edition reboot was simple: Will it still be about someone getting tomorrow’s newspaper today? Won’t they get, say, Twitter notifications from the future? The New York Times morning email a day early? Maybe they download a special news app?
Nope. Still a newspaper. But there’s a twist: now it’s a journalist getting the news from the future. As Variety puts it, “She then finds herself in the complicated business of changing the news instead of reporting it.”
But… her job?
The original Early Edition starred a young Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights), who didn’t just get the next day’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times—he got it delivered by an adorable cat. Knowing what would happen just one day ahead of time allowed him to try to change things for the better. Somehow, this show ran for four seasons, and also starred Shanésia Davis-Williams, Fisher Stevens, and the original Buffy herself, Kristy Swanson.
Variety says the reboot’s journalist character is “ambitious but uncompromising,” which doesn’t go very far to explain how she’s going to know the future but also do her job without countless kinds of conflict of interest, but it’s possible I’m expecting too much from a show about magical news.
The pilot episode is written by Melissa Glenn, whose credits include episodes of Iron Fist, Leverage, Revolution, and Zoo. It’s one of several ’90s reboots in the works at the moment, including Quantum Leap (which it has a lot in common with, being a show about trying to change the future, one small act at a time).
No casting or airdate has been announced yet. Unless someone’s got a newspaper from later this year they can check?
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Hey, I get a paper newspaper when they bother to deliver it. Support the local news! I loved this show. Turning a bad thing into a good thing has always been my jam. And it had a lot less moralizing and more running than the other bad into good shows of the time,
Maybe I’m being dense but I don’t understand how a journalist knowing the future makes for a conflict of interest? It’s not as if journalists compete with each other to write articles predicting the following day’s events and whoever guesses the closest gets published? Presumably she would only be able to report about events that have already happened, and not the events that she reads about in her magic future newspaper which she ends up changing anyway because that’s the premise of the series?
This is one those great little shows that I loved while it was airing, haven’t seen an episode since, and am frustrated that I seem to be the only person I know who actually watched it.