But will she have strawberry-blond hair? New TV Nancy Drew to be played by nonwhite actress
Famous girl detective Nancy Drew is coming back to television. But this time, don’t count on her having strawberry-blond hair.
Glenn Geller, president of CBS Entertainment, told the Hollywood Reporter that the fictional detective will not be played by a white actress in a TV series currently in development at the network.
“She is diverse, that is the way she is written,” Geller said. “[She will] not [be] Caucasian. I’d be open to any ethnicity.”
When the series began in 1930, Nancy Drew had strawberry-blond hair. While some of her hallmarks have been updated over the years -- she lost her convertible roadster for a more modern car somewhere along the way -- there were some things that never changed. Her best friends Bess and George. Her mysteries to solve. And her ethnicity.
The upcoming television series is making a lot of changes, not just finding a heroine of a different race. While Nancy was a teenager in the novels, her character in the TV series will be a woman in her 30s who works as a New York Police Department detective.
Nancy Drew was the brainchild of Edward Stratemeyer, the publisher who also created the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins. The Nancy Drew mysteries were published under the pen name Carolyn Keene and written by several people, most famously (although secretly at the time) Mildred Wirt Benson. The series of books, which began with “The Secret of the Old Clock,” continued to be published until 2003 and has sparked several spin-offs.
The Hollywood Reporter notes that several attempts have been made to bring Nancy Drew to the small screen, most recently by ABC in 2002. The network aired a television movie, featuring Maggie Lawson as Nancy, that was intended to be a pilot. The show never happened, though.
Actress Emma Roberts played the girl detective in a 2007 movie that received mixed reviews and disappointed at the box office.
There’s no projected air date for the new “Nancy Drew” series, which will be produced by Dan Jinks (“Pushing Daisies”), Joan Phelan and Tony Rater (“Grey’s Anatomy”).
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