Jennifer Beals Is On Netflix Right Now — In ‘Taken’

If you’re in the mood for a TV series that combines the revenge-thriller  genre with some covert-ops procedural goodness, you could do a lot worse than NBC’s Taken. The series is a prequel to the 2008 movie starring Liam Neeson, about a retired CIA agent whose daughter has been kidnapped, and so he must use his very particular set of skills to track down the kidnappers and make them pay. That film, which essentially kicked off an entire phase of Neeson’s career, was a surprise hit, so it’s probably not a surprise that a TV network jumped at the chance to hop onboard.

In the TV series, we see Bryan Mills as a younger man, played by Clive Standen. After suffering a tragic loss amid a terrorist attack on a train, Mills is asked to join an elite government covert-ops team, headed up by Christina Hart. It’s the kind of setup that leaves the door open for any number of action-intensive stories of the week. Kind of a slicker version of The A-Team, if we all knew that Faceman grew up to be Liam Neeson.

While Standen is a fairly anonymous choice to play Young Neeson, his secret government recruiter is a face most of us should recognize. Jennifer Beals has been a working actress since the 1980s, and while she’s been in everything from My Bodyguard to Vampire’s Kiss to Devil in a Blue Dress to Four Rooms, but it would be dishonest not to lead with the fact that in 1983 she starred in a little movie called Flashdance. It told the story of a welder who dreamed of a career in dance (or a dancer who dreamed of a career in welding? there was some overlap there), and so auditions for a spot in a prestigious dance academy. If you never saw the movie, you at least remember the soundtrack, which was among the hottest of the ’80s, featuring songs like “Maniac” and “Flashdance… What a Feeling.”

Beals was part of another cultural touchstone in the 2000s when she starred in Showtime’s The L Word, a landmark series for gay representation on TV. (Beals’ character, Bette Porter, placed at #35 in our ranking of the most important LGBTQ characters in TV history.) Beals later went on to star on on such TV shows as Lie to Me and The Chicago Code, where she played the role of Chicago’s first police superintendent.

Season 2 of Taken is airing new episodes on NBC, but if you want to catch up with the first season, including the introduction of Jennifer Beals, Netflix is where you want to go, as all ten episodes are currently streaming. Get your Beals fix in one high-octane package — what a feeling!

Stream Taken on Netflix