STARSKY AND HUTCH: You'll Be Shocked, Shocked to Learn About the Reboot's Shocking Twist

Fox Entertainment is gearing up for a Starsky and Hutch reboot after a previous reboot effort quietly died a few years ago with Sony Pictures Television Studios, presumably for lack of interest. But this time there’s a twist.

This second attempt at a new show will still be a buddy-based police procedural because we can’t get enough of those, centered on a pair of cops named Starsky and Hutch.

The reboot will be set in the “offbeat town” of Desert City, according to the Daily Mail, instead of the original show’s gritty Bay City. But that isn’t twisty enough for postmodern tastes, is it?

Also new to the reboot is a mystery involving both Starsky and Hutch and who framed their fathers and sent them to prison for a crime they didn’t commit. We’ve seen that story a million times before, so clearly, that can’t be the twist.

Presumably, our new Starsky and Hutch will still tool around in a bitchin’ muscle car, although it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll get stuck in a low-powered (by today’s standards) mid-’70s vintage Gran Torino. Maybe they’ll get an electric vehicle with the built-in beverage heater/coolers. Those are always nice.

But could a Mustang Mach-E be the twist that the new show’s audience — which Fox somehow believes exists — is looking for?

No, of course not.

Here’s the twist, and I hope you’re sitting because this is the twistiest twist that a network ever twisted up to give a 45-year-old franchise that twisty new show smell.

Are you ready?

Starsky is a chick. So is Hutch.

Get it? You’ll totally want to watch the new Starsky and Hutch because it’s a buddy police procedural with female police officers whose names you remember from before!

Maybe Fox could throw in the occasional cameo from David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser and pluck those fresh member berries right off the ’79 vines. Heck, they could go super-meta and cast Ben Stiller or Owen Wilson for the occasional comic-relief role because, hey, those guys were already in that reboot movie that’s only 20 years old.

There’s nothing wrong with police procedurals, provided you’re still into them after a jillion variations. And female cop shows have been around since Angie Dickinson launched the genre with Police Woman a year before either Starsky or Hutch were issued their pretend badges. Female buddy cops have been around since 1981 with Cagney and Lacey, which already got rebooted as a TV movie — Cagney and Lacey with a Twist: One of Them Is Black — five years ago.

Every single element has been done to death and then done some more. We reached the point long ago where “creativity” in Hollywood often consists of searching the archives for intellectual property that hasn’t been rebooted or “reimagined” for at least 15 years, then giving it the thinnest veneer of paint that isn’t even fresh.

Casting for Starsky and Hutch has yet to be announced, but my advice to young actresses is: Tell your agent to take a pass on this stinker.