Like it or not, we are in the Golden Age of the reboot. 2026 has already seen both Scrubs and Little House on the Prairie hit TV screens, while a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale, was surprisingly scuttled, seemingly at the last minute by Hulu. On the immediate horizon, there are no less than seven (!), with People citing five (Highway to Heaven, Baywatch, The Rockford Files, Bewitched and A Different World), HBO’s television adaptation of Harry Potter, and the latest and greatest, Prison Break. Of those, it’s The Rockford Files that stands out, with the 1974–1980 series enjoying a resurgence on the Apple TV Store. Deservedly so, no less, and if you aren’t one of those already rewatching NBC’s greatest detective series, you should be.
James Garner Trades the Old West for Modern-Day Malibu With ‘The Rockford Files’
Debuting in 1952, the American Western series Maverick bucked (no pun intended) the conventions of the genre, with creator Roy Hugginssaying: “In the traditional Western story, the situation is always serious, but never hopeless. In a Maverick story, the situation is always hopeless but never serious.” That edict played out through smart dialogue and open parody of popular Westerns, but the ace in the hole was James Garner. Effortlessly charming, his poker-playing hustler Bret Maverick avoided conflict at all costs, instead using his gift of the gab or the art of bluffing to that end. And if that didn’t work, there was always a back door to escape through.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
01
How does a room know you’ve walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you’re actually made of.
05
There’s a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick · Chapters 1–4 · 2014–2023
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.
The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.
The Fast and the Furious · Fast X · 2001–2023
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason.
You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible · The Final Reckoning · 1996–2025
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error.
You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard · A Good Day to Die Hard · 1988–2013
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable.
You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
But what does Maverick have to do with The Rockford Files? Much, with Huggins, who also created The Rockford Files with Stephen J. Cannell, asserting that the series is basically Bret Maverick as a modern-day private eye. As a result, the series does the same as its predecessor did, only upending the tropes of the detective series. It centers on Jim Rockford, played by Bret Maverick himself, James Garner, who is pardoned after serving five years in San Quentin Prison due to a wrongful conviction. Yet an ex-convict is still an ex-convict regardless, and with work hard to find, Jim opts to become an independent private investigator.
Only he has next to none of the stereotypical assets of the TV detective. He doesn’t have a big, luxurious office but rather works out of his mobile home. For that matter, he doesn’t have a big, luxurious home either, with the mobile home also serving as his living quarters, parked in a lot off a beach in Malibu. He avoids or talks his way out of physical altercations when he can, and is decidedly not very good at them when he can’t (not out of cowardice, but practicality: he can’t afford the hospital bills). Where most TV detectives are dressed impeccably, Jim’s style is more blue-collar, like a “truck driver in a suit.” And his ride is a Pontiac Firebird without the bells and whistles. But what he does have is quick-thinking, keen observational skills, the tenaciousness of a dog with a bone, and the tricks of his con-artist past.
David Boreanaz Has Big Shoes to Fill in ‘The Rockford Files’ Reboot
The storylines in The Rockford Files may not be entirely serious, but it doesn’t mean that they’re not engrossing. Quite the contrary: the writing is sharp, delivering smart, legitimate mysteries to solve without the self-seriousness that makes more conventional detective series feel formulaic, a predecessor of sorts to shows like Elsbeth. The dynamics between the characters in the series, particularly Jim’s truck-driver dad Rocky (Noah Beery Jr.) and Angel Martin (Stuart Margolin) feel comfortable and familiar, not forced. And well before The Simpsons (yes, dear reader, there was such a time), The Rockford Files had an opening title sequence that changed with each episode, where instead of a couch gag there’s a message being left on Jim’s answering machine, from creditors, past clients, or just plain goofy stuff.
But the reason why Jim Rockford, and Bret Maverick before him, are as captivating as they are is the man behind them: James Garner. The role is practically tailor-made for his particular talents. His pervasive charm is tangible, and Garner’s grasp of being a self-effacing hero with little machismo is genuinely funny and endearing. Garner has a way of falling just short of outright parody, grounding the character in reality while maintaining a laid-back warmth.
Long story short, David Boreanaz, star of the reboot, has big, big shoes to fill. But there’s reason to believe that Boreanaz can pull it off. He’s already cut his teeth on procedurals, his character from Bones, Seeley Booth, isn’t all that far removed from Jim Rockford as far as his charm and smarts are concerned, and he’s earned a lot of good will from fans over the years. He also knows that he can’t copy what Garner brought to the character — no one can — so he’s not even going to try. If nothing else, Boreanaz has the faith of one prominent figure who believes he can do it: Gigi Garner, James’ daughter, who gave Boreanaz her stamp of approval and told him she’s 100% on board (per the previously cited People). Can he? The only way to really know is to watch both the reboot and the original series.
