Everyone’s favorite ’70s movie is making a return to CBS, with a new spinoff of The Bad News Bears currently in development.
The series is written by Corey Nickerson, who previously executive produced Black-ish, and co-created Fresh Off the Boat and Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23.
The original 1976 film starred Walter Matthau as an alcoholic former professional baseball pitcher turned youth baseball coach. Its massive success spawned two sequels in rapid succession — 1978’s The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training and 1979’s The Bad News Bears Go To Japan.
The film was remade in 2005, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Billy Bob Thornton in the seminal Matthau role of Coach Morris Buttermaker.
It’s also not the first time the IP will be made into a TV series. Back in 1979, CBS aired a Bad News Bears series for two seasons, starring Jack Warden.
But this is the first time the coach will be female. According to Deadline, the new series will feature a down-on-her-luck divorced mom who coaches a team of misfits in cutthroat Little League. It is based on Nickerson’s own experiences coaching her son’s Little League baseball team. If the character is a former baseball player is unknown, so it may not hit too close to the original IP.
Nickerson will produce with Aaron Kaplan’s Kapital Entertainment and Wendi Trilling’s TrillTV. Nickerson is currently under an overall deal with CBS. She also wrote on Scrubs and My Boys.
Kapital previously produced a similar series for ABC back in 2013 called Back in the Game, which featured James Caan and Maggie Lawson playing a father-daughter duo. Lawson played a divorced mom coaching her son’s softball games with the help from her former minor league manager father (Caan).
No word on a release date yet.
