The Fast & Furious franchise has raced cars, robbed vaults, battled submarines and even managed to send a vehicle into space.

Now it is heading somewhere surprisingly ordinary. Television. Peacock has officially ordered the first live-action scripted television series set within the Fast & Furious franchise, with the show currently targeted for 2028.

After 25 years as one of cinema’s biggest action franchises, Fast & Furious is finally becoming a television universe as well.

This time it is actually happening

Vin Diesel previously revealed that television projects were being explored for the franchise.

At that stage, however, there was an important difference between talking about possible television spinoffs and Peacock actually ordering one.

That has now changed. The series has received an official order. Mike Daniels and Wolfe Coleman are attached as co-showrunners, writers and executive producers, while Diesel is also involved as an executive producer.

Specific details about the characters and storyline have not yet been revealed.

Television could actually be good for Fast & Furious

The earliest Fast & Furious films were far smaller than the franchise eventually became. The original movie revolved around street racing, theft and a relatively contained group of characters. Over time, the scale expanded dramatically. The characters became international operatives.

The cars became increasingly impossible. And every sequel appeared determined to find something even larger to blow up. That spectacle became part of the appeal.

But television could allow the franchise to rediscover something else. Smaller stories. A series could explore racing communities, new characters, criminal organisations or different cities without needing every story to escalate into another world-saving mission. It could even return the franchise to the street-racing culture that helped make the early movies popular.

Will Dom appear?

At the moment, there is no confirmation that Vin Diesel will appear in the series as Dominic Toretto. His involvement as an executive producer doesn’t automatically mean he will star in it. That leaves Peacock with several possibilities. The series could feature existing characters. It could introduce an entirely new group.

Or it could take place elsewhere in the same world while occasionally connecting to the films. A new cast might actually give the series more freedom. Trying to recreate the enormous ensemble and spectacle of the movies on television could easily make the show feel like a smaller imitation of the films.

Building something different might make far more sense.

2028 could change the franchise

The television show is currently targeted for the same year as the next main movie, Fast Forever. That makes 2028 potentially one of the most important years in the franchise’s history. The film series has been moving towards the end of its main storyline. A television branch gives Universal another way to keep the property alive beyond the central movies.

It’s a strategy we have already seen across modern franchise entertainment. Marvel moved between cinema and Disney+. Star Wars used television to expand into completely different corners of its universe.

Now Fast & Furious is attempting something similar.

From street racers to a full entertainment universe

Few people watching the original The Fast and the Furious in 2001 could possibly have predicted what the franchise would become. What began as a relatively straightforward street-racing crime movie became a multibillion-dollar global action phenomenon. Twenty-five years later, its next stage isn’t necessarily going to be bigger explosions.

It could be smaller screens. And depending on what Peacock does with it, television might actually give Fast & Furious room to become something different again.