There have been rumors about it since 2014. And now, it’s confirmed: Aaron Sorkin will adapt A Few Good Men, his stage play-turned-Oscar-winning-feature film, into a live event. It’s currently set to air on NBC in 2017. Start prepping your “I want the TRUTH!” jokes now.
The new Good Men will mark Sorkin’s first return to NBC since his time on The West Wing, The Hollywood Reporter notes. (Sorkin will write the teleplay adaptation—based on his original stage version—and he’ll also help to executive-produce the event overall.)
What the show will also mark, though, is a new era for the Live Televised Event, which has traditionally—at NBC, as at other networks—involved musicals. Peter Pan Live! The Wiz Live! Grease Live! It’s hard to imagine that the latest entry into the growing televised-theater genre will be named A Few Good Men Live!—not only because the name has probably been claimed, already, by a whimsical Vegas revue, but also because Sorkin’s play will not, like its predecessors, be a musical. It will be live, but not, alas, Live!
In that sense, you could look at A Few Good Men Live, soberly lacking in exclamatory embellishment, as a sign that we’re moving into an age that doesn’t need to rely on the antics of the musical to sell its properties. A Few Good Men, as a stage play and a film, is a perfectly serviceable military-legal drama. It has attained a broader cultural status by way of Internet imps and their “you can’t handle the truth!” memes. Its live-broadcast adaptation will likely be, like its predecessors, witty and electric and nuanced and dramatic and all the things that a good Sorkin production will be. It will not, however, feature jazz hands.