Angela Lansbury: NBC's MURDER SHE WROTE Reboot Was 'A Terrible Mistake'

Yesterday, Deadline reported that NBC's plans to reboot the hit series "Murder, She Wrote," would no longer be moving forward. Instead, the peacock network says it will be looking at an alternate approach to relaunch the franchise sometime further down the road.

Academy Award winning actress Octavia Spencer was to star in the new series while Alexandra Cunningham was set to write the pilot script with David Janollari producing.

Today, Dame Angela Lansbury, the show's original amateur detective Jessica Fletcher, told BBC News that she was "terribly pleased and relieved" to hear that the reboot will no longer move ahead. "I knew it was a terrible mistake," she said. "I didn't want to sully the memory."

She added: "Octavia Spencer is a superb actress. She had no business being put into a situation that she couldn't win."

The hour-long project was described as a re-imagining of the long-running CBS series which starred Angela Lansbury. The series is described as, "a light, contemporary procedural in the vein of Bones or Fargo, it follows a hospital administrator and amateur sleuth (Spencer) who self-publishes her first mystery novel. Set in a day where sensational headlines inundate the news, this woman's avid fascination with true crime leads her to become an active participant in the investigations"

The original Murder, She Wrote garnered 12 Emmy nominations for Lansbury. The series premiered in 1984 and aired for 12 seasons, spawning four follow-up TV movies as well as a spinoff series, The Law & Harry McGraw. According to the report, the original theme music will likely remain in this latest incarnation.

Lansbury was most recently seen on Broadway in The Best Man. The actress has received Tony Awards for her roles in Gypsy, Sweeney Todd, and Mame and earned Academy Award nominations for the films The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Manchurian Candidate and Gaslight.

To post a comment, you must register and login.