'Training Day' gets TV reboot on CBS

The television series “Training Day” arrives years after the movie it was spun off from, with a few key changes.

The police drama - which earned Denzel Washington his second Oscar for his portrayal of a rogue detective - gets weekly treatment starting Thursday, Feb. 2, on CBS. The new version reboots the premise of the 2001 film in several ways, including setting the show 15 years after the movie (whose director, Antoine Fuqua, returns as an executive producer) and switching the ethnicities of the leading characters.

Bill Paxton stars as Frank Rourke, a seemingly untouchable veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department's Special Investigative Section who unapologetically does things his own way ... not unlike Washington's Alonzo Harris. Justin Cornwell assumes Ethan Hawke's earlier character slot as Kyle Craig, the new partner who finds himself facing frequent ethical challenges from the way Rourke does business, while also trying to get to the bottom of his fellow-cop father's murder.

“The movie is its own thing,” maintains Paxton, “this iconic, classic crime story. The movie is where Alonzo is buried, so we sort of consider that sacred ground in some ways. We give Alonzo and Jake (the Hawke character) respectful distance in our show. I really liked what (writer-producer) Noah Hawley did with 'Fargo,' how that show exists in the same universe as the film, but (mostly), the two stories don't really brush against each other. We've kind of done that.”

Crime-procedural veteran Jerry Bruckheimer also is a “Training Day” executive producer along with Fuqua, who reasons that “you get to explore a little further than you can in a movie, about what's too far and what's not too far when it comes to doing the right thing for people who can't help themselves.”

Also playing “Training Day” detectives are Katrina Law and Drew Van Acker. Lex Scott Davis appears as Craig's history-teacher wife, and Julie Benz appears as a madam who has personal and professional agreements with Rourke.

Fuqua says that in casting Paxton and Cornwell, “We didn't talk about it like, 'Let's make (one character) white and make (the other) black.' It wasn't a racial conversation. It was like, 'Who are the best actors for it?' And then, when we found out Bill had interest, it was like, 'That's a good idea. Switch it and do that.' ... It was all about who was the right actor who had that weight, like a Denzel, for TV.”

Paxton is pleased the television incarnation “seemed to know what animal it was right out of the gate. I thought, 'Wow, this thing really has a great confidence in its execution and the characters,' and it kind of just takes off. It's just zero to 60 right away, and you are holding on for the ride.”