Retreads can keep broadcast on the road

At least they capture the reason their respective source material clicked with the public the first time around. Created by Jeremy Slater, the series pays homage to William Peter Blatty’s best-seller and the 1973 William Friedkin film, both in dialogue and in a quick shot of the concrete staircase in Georgetown that would prove useful for the film’s finale fun fact: The show moves the story forward to contemporary times, as a young Latino priest named Father Tomas (Alfonso Herrera) is visited by a wealthy parishioner named Angela Rance (Geena Davis) who is concerned that her elder daughter may be possessed. [...] a series of events, including tortured dreams in which Father Tomas seems to be present at the exorcism of a young Mexican boy by a man named Father Marcus (Ben Daniels), convinces him something supernatural is going on. The Friedkin film scared the bejesus out of its audience, and it’s safe to say that even if you didn’t see the movie but are old enough to remember when it was released, you can never look pea soup in the … eye? ... again. The TV version can’t quite go that far, at least not on a broadcast channel, but the special effects are convincing, and the script is a labyrinth of mystery and suspicion guaranteed to hold your interest. “Lethal Weapon,” another Fox show and premiering on Wednesday, Sept. 21, gets mileage out of sticking closely to the original Mel Gibson-Danny Glover film franchise, while tweaking the two characters to make them a better fit for modern times and the lead actors, Clayne Crawford as Martin Riggs and Damon Wayans as Roger Murtaugh. A former Navy SEAL and Texas narcotics cop, Riggs’ life falls apart after his pregnant wife is killed in a car accident. Flash forward a bit and he turns up at the Los Angeles Police Department, where he’s paired up with veteran, by-the-book cop Murtaugh, happily married, glad to be aboveground after open-heart surgery. The character tweaks help us see “Lethal Weapon” on its own terms, and not “just” a TV distillation of the original films. The original “MacGyver” starred Richard Dean Anderson in the title role of a secret government operative who could outwit any foe with only his mind and the use of his handy-dandy Swiss army knife. The two elements that earned the show a decent if not spectacular following were Anderson himself and the cool applications of science in every episode, which, for the Boomer audience, probably made them think of the old “Mr. Wizard” shows but with action scenes. The fact that Mac can take a copper wire and wrap it tightly around a piece of iron, turn it into a magnet and interfere with a thug’s earpiece reception is kind of ho-hum for a 21st century audience. David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, and co-host of “The Do List” every Friday morning at 6:22 and 8:22 on KQED FM, 88.5 FM in San Francisco, 89.3 FM in Sacramento.