Monday, October 11, 2021

“Bridges” Gets a Refit

Thanksgiving this year will offer us heaping piles of sliced turkey, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie … and apparently also Nash Bridges. Deadline reports that USA Network’s two-hour film based on the 1996-2001 CBS-TV crime drama “has been given a Thanksgiving weekend premiere date. It will debut on Saturday, Nov. 27.
The movie brings back original cast members Don Johnson and Cheech Marin as elite investigators for the San Francisco Police Department’s Special Investigations Unit. The film is part of USA’s modified programming strategy that focuses on event scripted programming. If the movie does well, it could launch a Nash Bridges series revival.
Resurrected for this holiday teleflick along with Johnson’s Nash Bridges and Marin’s Joe Dominguez will be Jeff Perry, who played technical expert Inspector Harvey Leek in the original show.

So, will we see Bridges and Dominguez older and wiser now? Certainly older: Johnson will turn 71 this coming December 15, and actor-comedian Marin is already 75. Little about the plot for USA’s movie is known yet, beyond Wikipedia’s vapid conspectus: “The revival will follow Nash, still running the SFPD’s SIU and working to adjust to a new boss and to the changes of San Francisco in the 2020s.” But the casting of several younger performers alongside the principals—among them Joe Dinicol, Diarra Kilpatrick, and Angela Ko—might suggest that the SIU’s senior staff will be sitting back while their less creaky colleagues dominate any action sequences.

Judging by a new promotional poster, though, it seems likely we’ll see at least one scene of Johnson and Marin racing around San Francisco’s hills in Nash’s signature 1971 Plymouth Barracuda convertible.

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