After Riverdale and Nancy Drew on The CW (Netflix and Showcase respectively here in Canada), I was extremely wary when they announced a new live action series based on The Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon. I didn't care that it was being developed for Hulu. All I heard was a live action Hardy Boys TV series with a modern take on the characters, and I immediately tuned out. What a horrible idea! While Nancy Drew had been in a movie in 2007, and a TV show and a movie in 2019, the Hardy Boys, Frank and Joe, hadn't been seen on TV since the short lived 1995 Canadian series, and unlike Nancy Drew, the Hardys have never had their own feature film. So would this new series be more like Riverdale, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and Nancy Drew? Yes and no.
From what I saw in the trailer, it's definitely edgier than previous incarnations of the Hardy Boys on Television. But it seems to more be in line with what the Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys comic books have been like than it does with what the three shows I mentioned are like. Actually it feels closer to what Runaways was during that show's first season. There are a few changes such as Chet Morton being black, and Biff Hooper being a girl. There also doesn't seem to be any sign of Chet's sister, Iola, on this show either, though Frank's girlfriend, Callie Shaw, is in the trailer. I don't know if this was intentional or not, but I also got a classic Scooby-Doo vibe from this trailer too. Like if they'd done a more serious version of Scooby-Doo when the first live action movie came out back in 2002.
I don't have a problem with the changes with Chet and Biff in the trailer, because, it is 2020 and diversity is extremely important these days. Plus The Hardy Boys series began publication 93 years ago, when diversity, be it gender, race or sexuality, wasn't a thing in media yet. So I can understand them wanting to add some diversity to the story, even if it means changing some of the long time characters like Chet and Biff, who were the two people who frequently joined Frank and Joe on their cases. And keeping Callie as part of the gang is crucial too, because, unlike Chet's sister Iola, Callie has been in just about every incarnation of the Hardy Boys from the original books, through the Casefiles series and even the more recent The Hardy Boys: Undercover Brothers series, though she doesn't appear in the Disney serials or the 1995 TV series. Though she has a significant role in the Casefiles series. So we'll see how that goes in this series when it starts airing next month.
One change I really noticed is that the Hardys live in Bridgeport instead of Bayport. I don't know why this change was made since there doesn't seem to be any story reason for it. Though Nancy Drew on The CW also changed the setting of that series from River Heights to Horseshoe Bay, Maine (another fictional town), so that could be why they changed Bayport to Bridgeport for The Hardy Boys.
I am honestly really excited for this series to air. The trailer looked really good in my opinion, even though it does look like other modern adaptations of classic comic book and novel series like Riverdale and Nancy Drew, though I hope it stays more faithful to the source material than the other two shows did. It doesn't have to be a perfect page to screen translation, and it won't be with the changes shown in the trailer, but I do hope that it at least keeps the spirit of the source material because it would be cool to have a Hardy Boys series based on The Hardy Boys Casefiles book series, if not the original The Hardy Boys Mystery Stories books.
Overall, I am genuinely excited for this show. The trailer looked really good, and I think I'm going to end up liking it. I realize I said that about Riverdale back in 2017, and that went off the rails pretty quickly by the end of the first season, I'm not familiar with the show's creator, Jason Stone or the other executive producers/showrunners, Joan Lambur and Steve Cochrane, though according to IMDB, Jason Stone was the executive producer on the 2013 comedy, This Is the End, which I haven't seen, so we'll see how these three people's styles fit into the Hardy Boys mythos. The Hardy Boys series in it's early incarnations was a huge part of my childhood. I read the original books, the Digest series (59 to 190 of the main series) and the Casefiles books, and watched the short lived 1995 TV series as well. So I have my fingers crossed that this series will do the characters justice and not get bogged down in trying to be like the CW shows like Supernatural, Riverdale or Nancy Drew.
I think what gets me the most about this show is that it's going to air on YTV here in Canada, giving me a reason to revisit the channel that my entire childhood was about, because Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Rugrats, Sailor Moon, Digimon, Pokemon, Animorphs, Radio Active, The Odyssey, Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Incredible Story Studio and reruns of Batman (1966 TV series), Spider-Man (1967 cartoon), and The Woody Woodpecker Show all aired on this channel, along with other shows that I watched or was aware of. So now I get to return to that channel to watch a TV show adaptation of another book series that I loved as a child, like I did with Animorphs in the '90s and the three TV movies based on Gordon Korman's Macdonald Hall/Bruno & Boots series in the late 2010s.
If you read any version of The Hardy Boys or watched any of the previous TV show incarnations, I would recommend checking this series out when the pilot airs on December 4th on Hulu in the U.S. or YTV here in Canada. December 4th is my birthday, so happy birthday to me, I guess? Lol. Night folks.
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