PASADENA, Calif. -- Fans of CBS's cancled military drama "The Unit" aren't the only ones disappointed to see the show gone. Executive producer Shawn Ryan had a plan mapped out for a fifth and final season that will never see the light of day.
"Listen, if the show had been owned by Paramount and 'Medium' had been owned by 20th Century Fox, we'd be making the fifth season of 'The Unit' now," Ryan said. Paramount is a studio owned by CBS, which picked up "Medium" this spring after NBC canceled it. Fox owns "The Unit." "We had a good pitch for the show.
"It was going to be like a whole new show," he said. "Bob was going to be training some young people for a whole
new organization. Jonas was finally going to be seeing his run end. The final season -- and I figured if we got a fifth season that would be the final season -- it was going to be a long final mission for Jonas. He's not medically cleared. Mac has to go in and change the medical records so Jonas can keep up. We had a whole thing planned. It was gonna be good."
As for that Pittsburgh-set series Ryan was developing, like so many other shows in development, it never made it to fruition. (I've learned my lesson on writing about shows in development in print and try to confine anything about speculative projects to the blog, although sometimes editors like to see them reverse published in print.) Ryan said Fox simply didn't want to make it.
"I hope to resurrect it," he said. "What we were told was there were a couple different comedy directions they could go and they seemed to go in a different direction."
Posted
Aug 06 2009, 09:02 PM
by
Rob Owen