Reboots and remakes being all the rage, it’s of little surprise that CBS has put to pilot a drama series based on director Antoine Fuqua’s 2001 film Training Day. It ticks several boxes for CBS, mostly in its potential as a cop procedural. The original movie starred Denzel Washington as an off-the-books kind of narcotics detective, and Ethan Hawke as his rookie partner. It won Washington his second Oscar, and helped launch the careers of Fuqua and David Ayer (who wrote the screenplay).

As we reported back in August, the idea for a Training Day series has been kicked around for awhile, and would take place 15 years after the film. According to Deadline, CBS’s version will also include a racial swap, where “an idealistic young African-American police officer is appointed to an elite squad of the LAPD where he is partnered with a seasoned, morally ambiguous Caucasian detective.” 

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Image via Warner Bros.

Fuqua is set to direct the pilot, which will be written by Will Beall (Castle, Gangster Squad), and produced by Warner Bros. and Jerry Bruckheimer’s TV banner.

As mentioned briefly early, the idea for the series is all well within CBS’s wheelhouse. The Eye also has another movie-to-TV adaptation coming with Rush Hour, though that will be a half-hour comedy, whereas Training Day is set to be a gritty drama (of course, but what if it was a dark comedy? That might actually be amazing … but far too avant grade for CBS). Also, I would presume the series will take place over several days, as it were, although it could conceivably be a super action-packed single day a la 24. We'll let you know more as it's revealed, but in the meantime, what would you like to see from this series? And is there any way CBS can allow this to not be terrible?