CBS’s ‘Training Day’ Picks up 15 Years After the Movie

Training Day, the hit 2001 crime movie starring Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke that won Washington his second Academy Award, is getting the small-screen treatment.

The CBS series picks up 15 years after Washington’s dirty LAPD detective Alonzo Harris went down in a hail of Mafia bullets, but the fallout from his corruption still reverberates across L.A. and within the force. Big Love’s Bill Paxton plays Special Investigations Section Detective Frank Rourke, who, like Harris, carries out his work via a very questionable brand of policing. He’s caught the attention of Deputy Chief Joy Lockhart (Blindspot’s Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who assigns idealistic Kyle Craig (Justin Cornwell, right, with Paxton) to go undercover as Rourke’s trainee in hopes of finding out if the LAPD vet has gone rogue. Complicating their mentor-mentee relationship: Kyle’s father used to be Rourke’s partner until he died under mysterious circumstances. “There’s a lot of ulterior motives in terms of Rourke’s past with Kyle,” hints Paxton. “And Rourke is not someone you want to poke with a stick, because he’ll come at you like a rattlesnake.”

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Both will battle their memories of the elder Craig—and try to figure each other out in the process—and Paxton teases that familiar faces from the original film will resurface. “As we get toward the last couple of episodes, the mythology goes directly back into the movie,” he says. “Characters return.”

Would it be possible to get Ethan Hawke as a special guest star, please?

Training Day, Series premiere Thursday, Feb. 2, 10/9c, CBS