CW’s Nancy Drew Adaptation Has Guys Between Nancy’s Legs and Gal Pal George Fayne Tattooed. Parents Are Going Wild.

American mystery series icon, Nancy Drew, has sleuthed and solved since the 1930s. Serving as the female counterpart to Edward Stratemeyer’s Hardy Boys series, all of Nancy Drew‘s characters have evolved with US culture. The CW’s adaptation is no exception.

This series premiered on October 9, 2019, and is the third Nancy Drew television series, following The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries (1977–1979) and a 1995 Canadian-American version.

The premise: “After 18-year-old Nancy Drew’s college plans are put on hold, she finds herself involved in a ghostly mystery when she and her four friends are witnesses (and suspects) to a murder, and team up to find the person responsible.”

In the pilot, centered around the fictional town of Horseshoe Bay, Maine, Nancy Drew spends her gap year waiting tables at The Claw with Georgia “George” Fayne.

Nancy, grieving her mother’s death, discovers a body with co-workers George, Bess, and Ace. The murder, of Tiffany Hudson, wife of local businessman Ryan Hudson, was pinned on Nancy by police chief (whom despised Nancy for years). She then breaks into Ryan’s house looking for evidence, finding a locket hidden in a secret compartment. The locket contains a reference to Lucy Sable, a girl who was killed nineteen years ago. While investigating a noise in the attic, Nancy finds Lucy’s bloodstained dress in a locked chest.

But back to George….

22-year-old Leah Lewis (The CW’s Charmed) plays the tough, tattooed girl “from the wrong side of the tracks.” While in the popular Nancy Drew Mystery Stories book series, she is Nancy’s best friend and cousin of Bess Marvin, in this series, George’s character felt personally wronged by Nancy in high school, but is forced to team up with Nancy after finding herself a suspect in the killing of Tiffany Hudson.

George Fayne is most frequently depicted as an athletic tomboy with short black hair and brown eyes, and has been re-imagined as a lesbian in Dynamite Comics’ 2018 comic. In the book series, her first boyfriend is a friend of Ned Nickerson’s named Buck Rodman, but later dates Burt Eddleton. (Ned is the guy Nancy is banging in the opening scene to the pilot episode.)

In the original series, George was always prone to danger and outspoken. By the mid-1960s, she learned judo, and often helps Nancy when the boys are not around to defend the trio of female friends, by using her martial arts as self-defense. By the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, her character embraces a softer side.

Does The CW’s adaptation take this into account for her character in the 2019 Nancy Drew TV series? Or did the producers just slap some tattoos on Leah Lewis to give that “tough chick” vibe?

Guess we will have to read more into it next week…