How CBS' True Lies Is Turning a Classic '90s Action Flick into a High-Octane Procedural

[Warning: The following contains spoilers from Wednesday's series premiere of True Lies. Read at your own risk!]

Nearly three decades after Arnold Schwarzenegger played an international spy disguised as a computer salesman who struggles to keep his double life a secret from his unfulfilled wife, True Lies has been adapted into a new action comedy series on CBS.

Based on James Cameron's 1994 blockbuster film that starred Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis, the updated True Lies follows Helen Tasker (Ginger Gonzaga), a disillusioned suburban housewife who discovers in the pilot that her seemingly unremarkable husband of 17 years, Harry (Steve Howey), is actually a first-class spy for a U.S. government agency known as Omega Sector. After being let in on the secret, Helen becomes Omega's latest recruit and joins Harry's team of close-knit operatives. Together, they embark on covert missions to outsmart and capture criminals around the world—all while trying to keep their weekly adventures a secret from Harry and Helen's children, Dana (Annabella Didion) and Jake (Lucas Jaye).

Following the premiere, TV Guide called up writer and showrunner Matt Nix—who executive produces alongside McG, as well as Cameron and his producing partner, Rae Sanchini—to discuss the major changes that he made for the reboot and the challenges that lie ahead for Harry and Helen as they work to revitalize their marriage.

During the process of adapting this story for television, what were some of the biggest changes that you wanted to make from a writing standpoint?
Matt Nix: People forget that the movie is two and a half hours long, so a lot of it was just slimming it down to its essentials and really making the spy story a bit more of a two-hander. Probably the biggest change was giving Helen some specific skills that would be useful. Not only is she bored, but she's also someone who has all of these skills that are under-utilized. She's never fulfilled her potential. In the movie, it definitely suggests that Jamie Lee Curtis' character is capable, and she, by the end, is working as a spy, but you don't really have a strong sense in the movie of what specifically she is good at as a spy.

So a big thing was giving Helen the skills of languages, she's good at driving, she's very physical and good at fighting, so that when she's dropped into a spy context, she doesn't need to spend an hour growing into the role. She's got it when she hits the ground.

And then another thing was we wanted to do something that recalled the movie but wasn't the same plot. In the movie, Harry is concerned that Helen is having an affair. In the show, Helen is concerned that Harry is having an affair, which made sense to everybody. I think if your husband is gone all the time and he's taking secret phone calls, it makes sense that you would suspect him of having an affair. We were also just doing a different kind of spy plot that was a little less complicated and convoluted because we don't have two and a half hours to explore a spy story [every week].

How are you hoping to expand and stretch this plot across multiple seasons?
Nix: With regards to how we expand the world, I think we're exploring a wide range of issues between Harry and Helen; Herry, Helen and their children; Harry, Helen and their friends, [including] the people on their team. So I think it's two things—one is expanding the family in the movie. You see the daughter's there at the beginning and at the end, and certainly, [Harry] had Gib on his team. But by including two more characters with Luther [Mike O'Gorman] and Maria [Erica Hernandez], expanding Gib's [Omar Miller] role and then including more of the kids, we're expanding the number of personal stories that can be told.

And then on the other side, I think the movie and the pilot both addressed the central question of: Are we gonna stay together? Is our marriage gonna work? But I think in the series, one of the things that we talked about in the writers' room is we should be addressing issues that the people in the audience have faced in their own lives. So you may not be a spy, but have you ever felt maybe a little like the spark has gone out of a relationship? Sure. In the second episode, have you ever been nervous about the ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend of your partner [showing up]? Sure. What happens when your husband's old buddy shows up and you can't stand him? Well, what if we do that in a spy context?

[We're] expanding the range of issues that we address so that it's not just this existential issue of: Is the marriage gonna stay together? Are you cheating on me? Those are big issues, and you'll burn out the story really quickly if you only do those things. But [there are] questions like: Are we being too firm with the kids or are we not being firm enough? Addressing that in a spy context is really fun and a lot more sustainable.

One of the other significant changes that you made was reimagining the character of Gib as a Black man. What parts of that character have carried over from the film? What will we learn about his personal life?
Nix: I'd say one thing we play in the show a lot more is Gib is legitimately brilliant as a tactician and the manager of the team. I love Gib in the film, [but] he's playing more this comic relief and support for Harry. In the show, Harry is the leader in the field, but Gib is really the leader of the team in terms of deciding what the priorities are, what they're doing next and how they're going to approach problems. So as we get into Gib's backstory, it's a lot more about a brilliant kid who grew up to be this brilliant tactician.

We'll meet his father and explore: What sort of person grows up to be someone like Gib? And what are the tensions there? In the movie, all you really know about Gib is that he has a rocky romantic life. In the show, Gib's gonna wind up with a relationship and he's gonna explore that. And how do you maintain a relationship if you're [working secretly] in a van all the time? So I think we've had a lot of opportunities to build that out.

Certainly, in the pilot, he's mainly running support, but he's Harry's best friend, and he's Harry's partner in a lot of ways. One of the things we talked about was the idea that Gib has basically been Harry's other wife. But also weirdly, he's been Helen's other husband. So one of the big things that we explore is Harry wasn't remembering Helen's birthday; Gib was remembering Helen's birthday. Every gift that Harry ever bought for Helen and the kids was bought by Gib, so in some ways, he's the third person in their marriage, so what are those tensions to be explored [there]? There's an episode down the road where Harry accidentally gives Helen a gift that he gave her three years before because he didn't remember that Gib gave her that gift, so Gib's embarrassed, Harry's embarrassed, and Helen's angry.

Luther and Maria have an existing personal and professional history that is established pretty early on. How do they feel about each other at the start of this show, and how will their relationship continue to evolve this season?
Nix: At the beginning of the show, they start out with this sort of teasing dynamic with each other. They're both these hyper-capable spies, but it becomes clear as the show goes on that they haven't really explored their emotional lives very deeply. So, yes, Maria is an incredible badass, and she's the youngest recruit at Omega ever. Luther is this fantastic fighter, and he's very good at all of these spy skills.

Mike O'Gorman describes his character as Joey from Friends—only as a super spy. [Laughs.] He's really smart about everything that the spies do but pretty dumb about everything else, and I think Maria is very tough and lives in this very macho world and acts like nothing really affects her, but it's clear that things really do affect her. So there's a lot of romantic tension between the two of them, but neither of them really has the emotional resources to make that relationship work. It's always fun to play the contrast between [how] the two of them cannot work out their personal relationship at all, but every time it's time to go into action, they are an amazing team, and they can't really reconcile the two sides of their relationship.

You've also introduced Mrs. Myers (Deneen Tyler), the trained assassin disguised as a cat lady who lives next door to the Taskers. Given that Harry and Helen are embarking on these international missions every week, will we be seeing a lot of Mrs. Myers taking care of Dana and Jake as well?
Nix: She recurs; she definitely will come back [throughout the season]. One of the things we discovered is there wasn't a whole lot of time—we've got 42 minutes—to tell an international spy story with tons of action. So we imagined, when we were starting the show, that there would be more time spent at home with kid B-stories and things like that. It turns out the amount of real estate that you have to go back to home base and see what's going on at home turns out to be somewhat limited, so I've got episodes for days that feature Mrs. Myers. I'm super excited about it. And it's just that the mechanics of the show [made us think], like, "Oh okay, wow, we need to actually find an episode that takes place in Maryland, because that's where she's based."

True Lies airs Wednesdays at 10/9c on CBS. Episodes stream the next day on Paramount+.