Tradecraft: Strike Back Strikes Back... Again

Strike Back is coming back. Again. The series began as a relatively serious and fairly grounded tense espionage drama with doses of spectacular action on the UK's Sky One. That version starred Richard Armitage and Andrew Lincoln. Then Sky got American cable network Cinemax to partner for a second series, but Armitage had moved onto those Hobbit movies and Lincoln was fleeing The Walking Dead, so they cast new stars Philip Winchester and Sullivan Stapleton under the auspices of a new American showrunner, Frank Spotnitz (Hunted, Transporter: The Series). The series became all spectacular action (and sex) at the expense of its realism and some of its intelligence, but remained quite fun. A direct continuation of the original British series (they brought back Armitage's character just long enough to annoyingly kill him off), that version proved very popular and lasted four seasons, ending last year. Winchester and Stapleton have since moved onto other shows.

Now, Deadline reports that a new version of the show, again, a direct continuation, but with different stars, has been greenlit by Cinemax and Sky. The idea behind the latest incarnation comes from its original UK executive producer Andy Harries, and will shift the format from its most recent buddy formula (after beginning as a series about a lone field agent) to a team format, along the lines of the recent Fast and Furious and Mission: Impossible movies. Jack Lothian, a British writer on the Cinemax series, is writing the pilot. In the new Strike Back, according to the trade, the secretive Section 20 "is restored in order to track down a notorious terrorist following a brutal prison break. Tasked with covert military intelligence and high-risk operations, the resurrected unit embarks on a lethal manhunt that will uncover a vast web of interconnected criminal activity. As the team journeys across the Middle East and Europe, they uncover a deadly conspiracy which threatens to overwhelm them all and change the face of modern warfare forever." The plots will reflect the current state of terrorism in the age of ISIL.