By Gavin Boyle
Will JAG ever get rebooted? Star David James Elliott says it’s unlikely but not impossible because the show’s creator, Don Bellisario, is still alive.
“I mean, there’s always a chance,” Elliot told Entertainment Weekly. “Don Bellisario is still alive. I mean, it’s his 90th birthday coming up. Certainly I think it would be interesting. I would be down for it, but I don’t know if it involved me. You know those reboots, they go, ‘Yeah, thank you. We got new guys.’”
While JAG has been off air for nearly 20 years — it ran from 1995-2005 — the world it created has become one of TV’s most popular through NCIS and its spinoff shows.
At the end of the series, Mark Harmon and other original NCIS characters including Michael Weatherly, Pauley Perrette and David McCallum got a two episode arc as part of JAG’s sister agency NCIS. These episodes served as a de facto pilot for the NCIS series and helped the show later launch.
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“JAG had two episodes at the end of JAG, those last two episodes served as kind of like a semi-pilot for NCIS,” explained NCIS star Wilmer Valderrama. “Then, you know, they come full circle. Mark Harmon leads this beautiful ship and creates something very different on television, an acronym where people are like, ‘What is NCIS?’ And then now it’s undeniabl[y] one of the most recognizable letters you could see. And, you know, a thousand episodes later and it’s not slowing down. It’s still the number one show.”
JAG’s characters are still around. Elliot and his co-star Catherine Bell were invited to join NCIS: LOS ANGELES for the show’s 10th and 11th seasons to reprise their characters.
“I did that because of R. Scott Gemmill, who was a writer in the first two seasons of JAG,” Elliot said. “He’s still a friend of mine. I pitched an idea to him, and he liked it. We were talking about maybe taking the Harm character and doing something with him or similar to [it], and then he goes, ‘Yeah, but why don’t we do this?’ And I went, ‘Oh, great.’ It was fun. It’s fun to work with him.”
While a JAG reboot is not currently in the works, in today’s era of television, nothing is out of the question. Studios have revived many other shows from JAG’s era in recent years, and with the continued success of NCIS, an interest in rebooting the show may eventually culminate in something more.
Read Next: NCIS’s 1,000th Episode Pays a Sweet Homage to Show’s History
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