the cast of nancy drew and the hardy boys

This year, a movie starring Sophia Lillis, had a limited release and like all Nancy Drew adaptations before it, earned middling reviews. CBS and NBC both developed projects centered on a middle-aged Nancy Drew, but declined to order series. In the ’00s, ABC aired a Nancy Drew pilot, passing on a series, and Emma Roberts appeared in a Nancy Drew movie. In 1989, a series for USA Networks, starring Margot Kidder, never finished its pilot, and in 1995, WB briefly aired, then canceled, a half-hour series with Scott Speedman as Ned. A younger Nancy Drew appeared in “Nancy Drew Notebooks.” When the original series, “The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories,” concluded, “Nancy Drew: Girl Detective” took over, with Nancy narrating her adventures in the first person. A Nancy in jeans and moussed hair graced the covers of “The Nancy Drew Files,” books aimed at a teenage audience. The ’80s, ’90s and 2000s saw several attempts to make over Nancy, in books and onscreen. “She’s not able to fly or turn herself invisible, but she gets it done in the way that somebody who’s reading the books maybe could get it done, too.” “She’s sort of an analog hero,” Melinda Hsu Taylor, the showrunner for the CW’s “Nancy Drew,” said.

An apotheosis of American girlhood, Nancy isn’t quite an everywoman - we can’t all crack a safe or pilot a speedboat - but she is an archetype, just generic enough for readers to imagine themselves in her sensible heels. The Nancy Drew books, which have sold more than 80 million copies, offer a model of femininity that is self-reliant, snappily dressed, capable of catching the baddie in time to make the college dance. In the 1950s, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, Stratemeyer’s younger daughter and heir to the Stratemeyer Syndicate, took over the series, instilling Nancy with some of her own Wellesley-educated refinement and drive. Benson, who wrote Nancy Drew books off and on for two decades, fleshed out Stratemeyer’s breakneck plot while imbuing Nancy with spunk, valor and an unflagging sense of her own moral rightness - although that rightness occasionally lent itself to burglary.

The cast of nancy drew and the hardy boys