Wearily acknowledging that movies pretty much now only exist so that idea-strapped executives can turn them into TV shows a few years down the line, NBC has announced that it’s turning the Red film series—itself based off of a comic book by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner—into a new, hour-long action-comedy Like the movies, the show will focus on the lives of retired intelligence operatives—probably not played by Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, or Morgan Freeman anymore, since palling around every few years to fire machines at each other on a movie set is one thing, and making a series commitment to do it all the time is very much another—but will apparently be “more grounded and authentic.”
Said authentic ground will be laid by Jon and Erich Hoeber, who wrote both the 2010 film and its 2013 sequel, and who will probably gain some empathy for their cast of older characters as they struggle to do the things that they’re accustomed to doing, while operating under the constraints of a much-reduced budget.