Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are everywhere, I kid you not. They've been a part of what is perhaps television's greatest currently running show, Fringe, since its genesis, and were heavily involved in the writing process of J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek reboot. (We won't mention Transformers.) The duo are even responsible for Hawaii Five-O, the new series which premiered this week on CBS (and was much better than I was anticipating).
Now, it seems, the duo are working with FOX to bring yet another spy show to air. What do I mean when I say "yet another?" Well, let's see. Covert Affairs and Undercovers have already premiered this year, and that's not to mention the handful of other spy shows in various fields of development. Exit Strategy may be a fresh breath to the quickly overloading genre, considering Orci and Kurtzman's expert handling of Fringe.
The show will be titled Exit Strategy because it is being pitched as "a high octane procedural set in the world of CIA agents who are sent in to 'fix' operations gone bad." (Let me just say that if this show was tweaked slightly to instead focus on Harvey Keitel playing the fixer Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction, I would be watching every episode live, no question.)
It'll all lie in the execution, but hopefully former Us Magazine writer David Guggenheim (who is penning the pilot) won't disappoint us.
We may or may not be seeing Exit Strategy hitting our small screens next year -- it seems likely that its success in the pickup stage will be reliant on the performance of shows like Undercovers. If spies can make a successful comeback to TV, then we may be having yet another Kurtman/Orci hour of television.