I don’t know about you, but I think “No Ordinary Family” is pretty meh, and I have no idea when “Capes” is coming to broadcast TV.  NBC’s “Heroes” has died a prolonged, choking death.  So why is there so much talk about Marvel (especially) and D.C. (kinda) jumping into the serialized TV drama market?  The news is exciting, with superstar David E. Kelley attached to a Wonder Woman project, a Blue Beetle series in production, Chew being looked at by AMC for a regular series, and the new animated Avengers series on Disney XD—probably the best new supercartoon I’ve seen since Teen Titans Go!  And those are just the almost-guaranteed ones—last week Marvel dropped several bombshells/hints about where it’s headed.  ABC has plans to develop a live-action Hulk show and another about Cloak and Dagger, with the latter being for ABC Family(!)  The C&D comics are pretty gritty—it’s hard to imagine them as family programming.  At the same time, Jeph Loeb (head of Marvel Studios TV) staked claims for shows about:

  • Luke Cage/Hero for Hire—But no Iron Fist!
  • The Eternals—Based on Jack Kirby’s vision of Gods posing as humans, not the Neil Gaiman reworking.
  • Agents of Atlas
  • A show called “Alter Ego” featuring Jessica Jones in her private eye role,
  • investigating superhumans—sounds like X-Files.
  • Moon Knight
  • The Red Hood: The guy with the demon-cloak from Dark Reign, but it sounds like it would focus more on Brian K. Vaughan Marvel Max series.
  • Ka-Zar Goes to New York
  • Punisher—pitched as a more mature cable offering.
  • Four anime series, reportedly already in development, about Iron Man, Wolverine, X-Men and Blade.
  • Daughters of the Dragon–Misty Knight and Colleen Wing

Clearly they can’t go ahead with all of these shows, but the interesting thing will be to see whether they continue to try to interrelate the universes, the way they do with their movies.  The four anime series are definitely planned to overlap, but if they shop their characters to different networks—especially ones outside of the Disney/ABC family—I don’t see how they can tie them together.  And will there be movie/TV continuity?  Animated/live continuity?

It’s great that they’re exploring their options, but if it were up to me, we’d also be seeing plans for:

  • A Justice League live-action spin-out of Smallville.
  • A new Teen Titans cartoon.
  • Punisher—yeah, that could definitely work well on cable.
  • Luke Cage with Danny Rand, not without him.
  • A “Sleeper” live action show.
  • A “Sweet Tooth” TV animated movie, like the high-quality ones they did for
  • Hellboy.

  • Nextwave!  The best anti-hero comic ever!  Who doesn’t want to see an animated Wover-MODOK?  I smell Adult Swim!
  • Franklin Richards: Son of a Genius as a kids cartoon.
  • A new Legion of Super-heroes ‘toon.
  • A Daredevil regular drama—I think it would work better than a film.
  • A ‘Mazing Man cartoon!  Come on!

What would you all like to see on the small screen?

About these ads