WHEN the original version of The Equalizer began in 1986 it followed Miami Vice, which had arrived two years before, in establishing a new kind of American TV drama.
t was tougher, grittier and more violent than the average US TV thriller series, but also considerably smarter.
In the RADA-trained Edward Woodward, a star in Britain thanks to Callan and cult horror classic The Wicker Man yet comparatively unknown in America, it had a new kind of leading man, too: a shortish, stocky, cultured, fiftysomething Englishman who wore elegant, expensive clothes, lived in a high-end apartment and drove a sleek Jaguar XJ6.
Oh, and he could kill someone with his bare hands if necessary — although he usually used one of several guns.
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Woodward’s character, Robert McCall, who appeared to be independently wealthy, looked like a successful businessman; in fact, he was a former operative with an unnamed US intelligence agency who now used the skills acquired from his career as a spy to exact justice for ordinary, innocent people who found themselves in dangerous situations.
The details of McCall’s past — which sometimes bled into the present in the form of old adversaries or a bit of unfinished Cold War business — were deliberately kept murky, although the pro bono service he provided to those in trouble appeared to be some form of atonement.
The Equalizer turned Woodward into a star in the US and, much to his amused surprise, something of a sex symbol for women of a certain age. Not bad going for a man who was 55 when it started, 59 when it ended and suffered a heart attack in between.
The series also had the coolest opening title sequence and theme music (a percussive belter by Stewart Copeland) on television at the time.
Alas, last night’s gender-flipped reboot of The Equalizer (Sky Witness) doesn’t have anything comparable to either of these. What it does have is Queen Latifah, and she’s the best reason to watch it.
Mercifully, the series completely disregards the two ultra-violent big-screen bloodbaths with Denzel Washington, which were more like a tooled-up retake on Taken than The Equalizer, and uses the same basic premise as the original.
Latifah is former CIA agent Robyn McCall, who quit the spy game because of something that went wrong in Venezuela and has returned to New York to be with her 15-year-old daughter Delilah (Laya DeLeon Hayes), who was looked after by Robyn’s aunt Vi (Lorraine Toussaint, given little to do) when Robyn was away on “business”. Delilah believes Robyn worked for a charity organisation.
Robyn gets into the equalising business by accident after rushing to the aid of a teenage girl who witnessed a man being murdered and is now being framed for the killing with a highly sophisticated deep-fake video.
The trail eventually leads to an Elon Musk-type tech executive whose fingers are jammed into some very unsavoury pies.
Like the original McCall, this one has a team of old associates to help her out, including genius computer hacker Harry (Adam Goldberg) and his wife Melody (Liza Lapira), a weapons expert and crackshot.
A smirking Chris Noth also pops up as Robyn’s old CIA boss, an equivalent character to Robert Lansing’s “Control” in the original.
But Robyn relies mostly on her wits and her fighting skills. In one scene, she drops four armed goons in seconds. The Equalizer was shown in an 8pm slot in the US, meaning that while there’s plenty of action, it’s mostly of the strictly bloodless variety.
There are a couple of reasons to root for the series. Latifah, for one, and also the fact that this is only the fifth hour-long US network drama to be led by a Black woman. A pretty appalling statistic, really.
But like the CBS network’s other reboots of old series (Hawaii Five-0, Magnum PI and others) it’s by-the-numbers genre stuff with, so far, no flavour of its own.