I've been working on an essay about how to reboot Blake's 7 for about a year on and off — I've even attempted to interview one of the people who worked on reviving the show in the past. But now that there is a new announcement that a reboot maybe in the works, I've decided I ought to get this thing done once and for all.
In case you missed out, Blake's 7 is a British TV show that ran from 1978 to 1981, featuring a gang of revolutionaries and felons teaming up to fight an evil galactic empire called the Federation. It often feels like a more grown up and darker version of Doctor Who, while also exploring the underside of space operas like Star Trek. Blake's 7 has had a huge influence on media sf, including things like Babylon 5, and I'm pretty sure the recent Star Wars show Andor. I wrote a beginner’s guide to Blake's 7 here.
So it was announced the other day that Multitude Productions, a production company led by former Doctor Who and The Last of Us director Peter Hoar, had purchased the IP of Blake's 7. They’re working on selling a relaunch. Since most of the original cast is no longer around, this show pretty much has to be a retelling rather than a continuation — which feels like the right move for a show with such deep lore and so few die-hard fans.
(As a side note, I found myself wondering if they really do have the IP, since Blake's 7 has been tied up in so many different deals with so many different players that I wouldn't be surprised if Terry Nation's estate did not control all of the rights anymore. There’s a reason it’s never gotten a DVD/Blu-Ray release in the United States. But that's not my problem to worry about!)
So here are my thoughts on what needs to happen for a successful new version of Blake's 7:
Try to recapture the magic of those characters
So much of what makes the original Blake's 7 work feels like a happy accident. There's no way Terry Nation, Chris Boucher and David Maloney could have known that Gareth Thomas and Paul Darrow would’ve had such incredible chemistry when they started out.
Thomas plays Blake, the fanatical revolutionary who will do literally anything to destroy the totalitarian Federation. Darrow plays Avon, a cynical computer hacker who is only out for himself — but is nursing a broken heart. Blake's idealism and Avon's cynicism power the show, and most of my favorite moments are when the two of them are throwing off sparks together. In the final stretch of season two, there's a moment where Avon looks at Blake and says, “I want to be free of him,” while Blake looks away. And then a short time later, Blake insists that he has always trusted Avon from the very beginning. It's incredible stuff.
I would make the actors playing Blake and Avon do multiple chemistry reads. If you cannot nail their spiky, thorny relationship, then this isn't Blake's 7, it's some other show. Blake and Avon are so attuned to each other they sometimes finish each other's sentences -— literally, this happens in the season one episode “Breakdown,” and it feels magical. Avon cannot admit how much he admires and even loves Blake, and Blake is uncomfortable with how much he depends on Avon.
And look, I'm just going to say it. This show is a little bit Our Flag Means Death, with Blake as Stede and Avon as Blackbeard. Not nearly as funny, obviously — though there is some great humor in the original show. But these two have a romance which stops short of naked make-outs, but feels every bit as hot. If I were working on a Blake's 7 reboot, I would have actual romance between Blake and Avon penciled in for season two — with strong hints throughout season one. The original show queer-baited fans so intensely, it's baked in to the concept.
The makers of a new Blake's 7 are going to have three choices: make the Avon/Blake relationship boring, give them intense romantic chemistry that never pays off, or do a slow-burn romance. I strongly prefer the third option.
Speaking of happy accidents, another of the most iconic characters in Blake's 7 is Servalan, one of the leaders of the evil Federation. There's no way anybody could have predicted the outrageously campy and off-the-chain performance Jacqueline Pearce gives in what was probably meant to be a minor recurring role. She's Effie Trinket, Cruella De Vil, and Divine all rolled into one, and she provides a lot of the camp energy in the show — plus, here and there, surprising moments of pathos. She's exactly who would rise to the top in a corrupt totalitarian regime, but she's so far from your standard image of a jack booted thug that she throws everything out of whack.
In terms of other main characters, you just need a really good comedian to play Vila the cowardly thief, and I would introduce Dana the weapons expert way sooner — preferably in the first few episodes even. Maybe there could actually be seven characters this time around!
Don't just try to be Andor
As I mentioned, there are a lot of similarities between Blake's 7 and Star Wars: Andor, and comparisons are inevitable. Making a new Blake's 7 now is not unlike making a John Carter movie after Avatar and Star Wars: everyone will think you’re copying the thing that actually copied your source material.
That said, Blake's 7 is not Andor. It's often a lot campier, as I mentioned a moment ago. It encompasses a range of tones in fact, from sitcom to drag show to gritty dystopian drama — and all of those tones are important, because they provide the emotional range of the show.
Also, Andor does not have any Chuck Schumers, and Blake's 7 is chock full of Chucks. By this, I mean well-intentioned liberals who work for the evil empire — or are nominally in a leadership position — and who really believe that the system works and that we can accomplish justice if we only do things the right way.
Yes, Andor has Syril Karn, who believes the Empire is a force for good and becomes disillusioned by the Ghorman Massacre. But Syril is always a bit of a fascist who believes that order is necessary and that dissidents ought to be crushed. He simply comes to understand that the Empire is going beyond even that level of fascism.
Meanwhile, in Blake's 7, you have people like the attorneys who represent Blake at his show trial, who really believe that the system isn’t rigged. You have the many Federation leaders and military officers who protest vociferously when Servalan appoints a war criminal named Travis to lead the hunt against Blake. At every turn, Blake's 7 takes pains to show us that there are people working within the Federation who truly believe in the rule of law and civil society — and those people are fools.
The Federation is utterly evil, using drugs and propaganda to control its citizens and exploiting countless worlds — but if you live inside its comfortable bubble, you can believe the rule of law still matters. That any abuses are an aberration and that “this is not who we are.”
The other way that Blake's 7 is different from Andor is that Blake himself is a war criminal, and the show knows this. Nobody in Andor, not even Luthen, is ever willing to go to the inhumane extremes that Blake chooses.
Most notably, Blake spends a lot of season two plotting to destroy the central computer that controls much of the Federation, reasoning that this will deal a devastating blow to his enemy. Destroying this computer, however, will also cause mass starvation among civilians on countless inhabited worlds — Blake knows this perfectly well, and sees it as acceptable collateral damage. Imagine Andor if Andor was helping to build the Death Star on purpose.
Blake also explores the possibility of teaming up with drug dealers and human traffickers, whose networks might help him to outsmart the Federation — and he's only deterred by the realization that the criminals already work for the bad guys.
Star Wars is very American, whereas Blake’s 7 is quintessentially British. It's about having suffered through the Blitz and the long struggle against fascism within living memory — Terry Nation was utterly obsessed with Nazis — and also about the memory of the cruel, horrific British empire. The Brits were the evil empire, and then they were nearly crushed by another evil empire — and people who were alive in 1977 could remember both things. Only a deeply repressed culture with powerful memories of being the oppressor and the oppressed could create something this weird.
In fact, I would argue that the show’s technicolor campiness is what buys it permission to have so much moral complexity and such shades of gray.
You're going to have to make a lot of changes
Up till now, I've mostly talked about what works in the original Blake's 7, and how hard it will be to duplicate. (Or to come up with something even half as good.)
But along with those happy accidents I mentioned, there are some bizarre narrative fumbles. In season one, the most advanced starship in the galaxy and an unstoppable supercomputer both drop into Blake's lap, more or less through pure luck. When Blake is put on a show trial in the pilot episode, he's wrongly convicted of being a child molester, which ought to be an ongoing problem, but is never mentioned again. The early episodes introduce a lot of other subplots which go nowhere.
There's a ton more. Like the alien invasion from beyond the galaxy that shows up and is summarily dismissed without us ever even learning anything about those invaders.
But the biggest problem is that Thomas, the show’s star, quit after two seasons, apparently because he thought Blake was too much of a goody-two-shoes and it was boring to play. (Really. He said this in a bunch of interviews that I found online. It is baffling to me.) The show does an incredible job of handling Blake's absence, but it really hinders a lot of the ongoing storylines. In particular, I've always thought it would be interesting to see what it looks like when Blake starts winning: how he tries to create a better society after shedding so much blood.
I also think that a reboot could lean a little bit harder into the core concept of Blake turning a group of mostly escaped criminals into his guerrilla force against the Federation. One of the ways the show pulls its punches slightly is that Blake's crew omiraculously does not include anybody who’s done anything terribly bad. Avon tried to rob the Federation Treasury, Jenna is a smuggler, Vila is a petty thief, and Gan killed someone who was attacking his wife. It wouldn't be a bad idea to have one actual violent offender in the mix, as an easy way of heightening the ethical conundrum of recruiting felons to join the revolution.
Hire at least one sitcom writer
My final tip is just that the writer's room absolutely should include some sitcom writers. A huge part of Blake's 7’s winning formula is Chris Boucher's uncanny ear for sharp, funny dialogue. The man was unrivaled at writing razor-sharp lines: cynical, goofy, profound, deeply moving. Terry Nation, too, began his career as a comedy writer and always kept that sense of comic timing. As a result, Blake's 7 is a drama that is very much written like a comedy, and there needs to be at least one sitcom writer punching up all the scripts. Or just steal the lines that Boucher already put in there, which are iconic for a reason.
Music I Love Right Now
I was at church choir camp one summer when I was 12 or 13, and we were all obsessively listening to Tower of Power’s landmark 1976 live album Live and in Living Color. Singing along to “Down to the Nightclub (Bump City)”, freaking out over the intricate horn arrangements and epic organ solo in the twenty-three-minute version of “Knock Yourself Out.” Our tiny minds were BLOWN.
All these years later, I still love Tower of Power — and last weekend, I was lucky enough to see them during their residency at Yoshi’s in Oakland. Seeing them in an intimate setting was utterly magical: all these horn arrangements that I’d memorized years ago, I finally got to watch unfold in real time. They played some hits, but also some songs they seldom play, and it was clear they’re doing a different setlist every night. There are still tickets available for this weekend, so if you’re near Oakland and have the money, I highly recommend seeing them in concert.
Also! I’m once again obsessively listening to the recording of their 50th anniversary concert, 50 Years of Funk and Soul, which packs an incredible punch and is a terrific intro to their music. And if you already love Tower of Power, I highly recommend checking out the Strokeland Superband, a side project for “Doc” Kupka and some other Tower of Power vets, which leans a bit more in a blues/soul direction but still gets seriously funky. There are some wickedly sharp songs, including “When Will Colin Powell Write His Tell-All Book” from 2006-ish. Well worth checking out!