What David Boreanaz Asked James Garner's Daughter Before Saying Yes To Rockford Files Reboot

Everything old is often new again, and such is the case with basically any franchise. If anything was successful once as a movie or TV show, you can be all but certain that once enough time has passed, it will be rebooted. The latest old school series to come back to TV in a new form is The Rockford Files on NBC.

The original series from the 1970s starred the late James Garner as private detective Jim Rockford. Now, David Boreanaz, formerly of the CBS-to-Paramount+ series SEAL Team as well as Bones and Angel, has been cast as the new lead in a pilot for a rebooted version of the series. It turns out that before he accepted the role, he reached out to Garner’s daughter, and Gigi is completely behind the reboot, if for no other reason than she thinks it was incredibly classy of him to ask. She posted to X:

Gigi Garner’s Twitter handle is Mavrocksgirl, a mash-up of Maverick and Rockford, her father’s two most famous roles. That's all I need to know to understand just how important her father’s legacy, and those roles specifically, are to her. That makes this endorsement all the more importan.

The original Rockford Files starred Garner as a wrongly convicted, and later pardoned, man who becomes a PI. It ran for six seasons. Many current and future stars would appear on the show. Tom Selleck had a small recurring role that would lead to Garner becoming a mentor, and also had one of the most famous opening sequences in TV history.

It is quite a classy move for David Boreanaz to call James Garner’s daughter to talk to her about the role. The pilot would almost certainly have happened whether or not James Garner’s daughter supported it, but it was seemingly important to the actor to at least understand how the family felt about bringing back a character that was so integral to Garner’s career. That importance was on display again when Boreanaz posted about his own casting on Instagram, as he thanked NBC, but he also thanked James and Gigi. He wrote…

This isn’t the first time an attempt to reboot Rockford Files has been made. A pilot of a new series was filmed back around 2009 starring Dermott Mulroney in the Rockford role, but it never made it to series. A Rockford Files movie was in development starring Vince Vaughn in 2014, but it seemingly lost steam following James Garner’s passing that same year. Per Deadline, the new series is still only in the pilot stage, so it remains to be seen if NBC orders it to series.

As somebody who grew up watching Rockford Files reruns on TV, I’m certainly curious to see what comes of this new project. A good detective series never ages, so there’s no reason a modern version of the show can’t work. The only question is how to open each episode, considering nobody has an answering machine anymore!