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| The Greatest American Hero – Meena (Hannah Simone) |
Believe it or not, she’s the star! ABC announced they’ve cast Indian-American actress Hannah Simone to star in their new comedy The Greatest American Hero.
Simone is a 37-year old Canadian actress, television hostess, and former fashion model. She was born in London, Englan to an Indian father and an Italian mother. Hannah Simone starred in several movies like Killing Gunther, Band Aid, Flock of Dudes and Old Boy. She’d best known for seven seasons on the comedy New Girl and reportedly looked at multiple offers before taking on the role. It’s the first television show to star an Indian superhero and one of only a handful starring a woman of color. That number gets slightly larger when you count superhero shows starring people of color.
The 1981 cult classic starred William Katt as a school teacher named Ralph Hinkley (later Hanley) who gets a super-suit from aliens. Even though the suit has great powers he lost the manual and has to teach himself how to do everything. He teamed up with government agent Bill Maxwell (Robert Culp) to fight crime.
It was one of my favorite shows as a kid but it never really lived up to it’s potential. While he would goofily fly around and had very funny moments the show was actually a drama. We’d call that a dramedy today and those are always lame.
The new show will be a single-camera half-hour comedy. Simone’s character Meera is described as “a 30-year-old woman who loves tequila and karaoke and has spent her life searching and failing to find meaning, much to the chagrin of her traditional Indian-American family.”
It hasn’t been announced if she gets her suit from aliens. The show only says that she has “an inexplicable event” that will “change the course of Meera’s life forever: she is entrusted with a super suit to protect the planet”. Deadline.com teases “Meera may have finally found purpose, but the world has never been in more unreliable hands”.
The idea of a reboot of The Greatest American Hero has been floated around since 2014, so we’ll have to watch and see if this happens. Either way, it’s pretty cool.
What do you think of the remake? Have you seen the original show?
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