NBC Will Recycle ‘Hardy Boys’

The 1977-79 series “The Hardy Boys” will be the first TV series to be resurrected as part of NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff’s plan to re-cast and re-shoot old TV material to plug holes in the fall schedule left by the writers strike, the network said Thursday.

“As I said (when the idea was publicly unveiled two weeks ago), I would start moving on this plan July 14, and this is July 14,” Tartikoff said in an interview.

Tartikoff said “The Hardy Boys” will air Sundays at 7 p.m., the slot in which the network’s new “Magical World of Disney” hour was to have debuted. “The Hardy Boys” will be replaced once a month with a Disney movie, he said, adding that the debut of original Disney programming will probably be delayed until January.

The revival has not been cast yet, but the NBC programming chief said he and Universal, which will produce the show, will be looking for “the next Kirk Cameron or Michael J. Fox” to star.

The Disney Sunday hour was the fall show most deeply affected by the Writers Guild of America strike and so was the first to be replaced, Tartikoff said. He said NBC will decide how to fill remaining time slots one by one as it becomes clear which show is next in being “past the point of no return.”

Tartikoff also said the network is looking at a pilot of a variety show starring Suzette Charles and John Byner as a possible “strike-proof” fall show, and that another show unaffected by the strike, the reality series “Funny People,” went into production last week. It is scheduled to premiere July 27.

NBC has whittled 200 submissions of old series and other strike-proof programming options, including British and Canadian scripts, “down to about a dozen,” he said, and will announce a revised fall schedule probably within 10 days.

Tartikoff said writers guild members who have scoffed at the idea of NBC using British or other foreign scripts because guilds support each other worldwide “clearly don’t understand that we’re buying existing scripts, not new scripts. They’re just not getting the message that we’re serious about this thing, and we’re going to get it done, and they’re going to be out in the cold.”