CBS Television Studios to Produce NBC Robert Langdon Series

CBS Television Studios has scored a major order for a new series.

Variety reported last week that NBC has given a production commitment to a new drama series following Robert Langdon, the protagonist from Dan Brown’s hit novels The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. The series will be based on the novel The Lost Symbol, the third book in the Robert Langdon series. Dan Brown will be an executive producer for the series, and it will be produced by Imagine Television Studios, Universal Television, and CBS Television Studios.

So why is this news good for Star Trek? If you recall, one of the drivers behind CBS’s healthy growth in the first quarter was their ability to sell their shows to other networks. Also, as we’ve seen with the recent Amedia TV deal in Russia, CBS has been known to syndicate their shows overseas, even if they’ve been sold to a rival network here in the United States (like ABC’s A Million Little Things and The CW’s In the Dark). Whether they will choose to do so here remains to be seen, but nonetheless, a production deal for the first television series based on the phenomenally-successful Robert Langdon stories is a win for CBS. At least in my book. And as long as Star Trek remains a flagship CBS property, that’s a win for Star Trek, too.