NBC has announced plans to bring the ’90s sitcom Coach back to television, with star Craig T. Nelson set to reprise his Emmy-winning role as Hayden Fox, the former coach of Minnesota State University’s (fictional) football team, the Screaming Eagles.
According to EW, the series will see Fox coming out of retirement to be an assistant coach when his son is named the head coach of an Ivy League school’s brand-new football team. The series will be set in Pennsylvania, and Nelson is the only confirmed returning cast member at this point.
The original series’ creator, Barry Kemp, will serve as writer and executive producer on the sequel series, which NBC has green-lit for an initial, 13-episode season.
Coach premiered in 1989 and ran for nine seasons, earning Nelson a Primetime Emmy Award and guest actor Tim Conway an Emmy as well. Over the course of the series, Nelson’s character progressed from coaching his struggling college team through the highs and lows of Division I football to taking a head coaching position for the fictional Orlando Breakers, an expansion NFL team modeled after the real-world Jacksonville Jaguars.
The final season of Coach saw Fox coaching the team into the NFL playoffs, only to lose to the Buffalo Bills. An epilogue to the series finale indicated that Fox eventually retired from football and was replaced as coach of the Orlando Breakers by his longtime assistant, Michael “Dauber” Dybinski (Bill Fagerbakke), who proceeded to lead the team to two Super Bowls.
There’s no word on when the new Coach series will premiere on NBC.
