TV Jots

Fridays Are About to Get Historic

Am I mistaken or is NBC’s new action-adventure drama Crusoe, which premieres tonight from 8pm to 10pm EST with “Rum and Gunpowder,” the only TV show on the tube these days based on a novel from the early eighteenth-century?

Of course, that book is English author Daniel Defoe‘s Robinson Crusoe, a fictional work of literature that has remained tremendously popular since it was first published back in 1719.

Like the book, NBC’s adventure drama — appropriately filmed abroad in England, Seychelles, and South Africa — relates the experiences of English businessman Robinson Crusoe (Philip Winchester, interestingly an American actor among a flood of European series leads), who becomes stranded on a deserted island after he sets sail for the new world to find a way out of his debts in London.

Although the series departs from the book in some respects, almost by necessity — television and books are quite different mediums, of course — one of its most enduring and endearing elements, castaway Crusoe’s faithful sidekick Friday (Zimbabwe’s Tongayi Chirisa), remains for the TV ride.

I’m looking forward to seeing how Crusoe holds up on television, not only because the tale is a classic, but also because the series could represent a much-needed breath of fresh air on the small screen, which currently seems dominated by a glut of crime procedurals and (tongue in cheek) other 21st-century fare. We need more successful historical programs, even if they are fiction!

Check out a preview for Crusoe below to see if it’s your thing.