Murder, She Wrote the latest old series to win a remake Actress Octavia Spencer, who won an Oscar for best supporting actress for her role in 'The Help,' will star in the reboot of Murder, She Wrote. Photo: Jason Merritt One of the most popular television series of the 1980s and 1990s, the mystery series Murder, She Wrote, is to be exhumed by a risk-averse Hollywood hungry for fresh ideas. The original series starred Angela Lansbury as an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery authoress named Jessica Fletcher who doubled as an amateur sleuth. The reboot will be built along similar lines, but will star Oscar winner Octavia Spencer. The popular TV series Murder, She Wrote, starring Angela Lansbury, is being re-made with Octavia Spencer in the lead role. murder she wrote <> During its 12-year run from 1984 to 1996, Murder, She Wrote was one of the most popular mainstays of the Ten Network in Australia, despite the fact that its schedule, at that time, skewed towards under-40-year-olds with British and American library series. Although it might be romantic to imagine a rebooted Murder, She Wrote could do for Ten in 2014 what it did two decades earlier, the show will most likely end up on Channel Seven. It is being developed at the US studio NBC Universal, which currently has an output deal with Seven in Australia. The reboot, which NBC Universal is developing for its US network NBC, is being billed as a "re-imagining of the series," much like Foxtel's "re-imagining" of Prisoner, Wentworth. In the US trade newspapers it is being compared to the hit series Bones. Spencer will play a hospital administrator who self-publishes her first mystery novel and embarks on a career as an amateur sleuth. Spencer, who won her Oscar for her role in The Help, has recently guest starred on the new Chuck Lorre-produced sitcom, Mom. If the reboot of Murder, She Wrote proceeds to series, it would be Spencer's first regular television role. The biggest risk is that the NBC network has a poor record of reboots from the Universal television library. NBC has steered reboots of Knight Rider, Bionic Woman and The Munsters in the past and none of them were successful. This year, NBC "re-imagined" another Universal library series, Ironside, which has just been cancelled after only a handful of episodes. The original Murder, She Wrote was produced by Universal Television - as it was known then - for the CBS network. It turned Angela Lansbury, then best known as a Broadway star and film actress, into a television star and a household name. Lansbury won the role after All In The Family star Jean Stapleton and film icon Doris Day turned it down. After the series was cancelled in 1996, four telemovies were produced between 1997 and 2003. A computer game based on the series was released in 2007 and a spin-off series of books based on the Jessica Fletcher character have been in continuous publication since 1989. A total of 41 books have been published, the most recent of which are Prescription For Murder and Close-Up On Murder, both published this year.