The pilot script for TNT’s putative Teen Titans show has leaked, and so far the roster is four women to two men.
To recap: TNT and Warner Bros. are working on a show based on the Teen Titans, but where everybody’s already not a teenager anymore, so they’re just going to call it Titans. Right now it’s not a totally done deal: just a pilot order. Based on the strength of that pilot the network can go ahead or drop the idea. Apparently it’s about time to start casting for that pilot, and Nerdist’s Jessica Chobot has apparently seen the script, and knows the team lineup. So who’s on the team? AÂ lot of ladies.
I mean, Barbara Gordon as Oracle in everything but name, Raven, Starfire, and even Dawn Granger, the female incarnation of Dove are apparently on the roster. Chobot says Raven (under the name Rachel Roth) and Starfire appear as “buttons” at the end of the pilot, but that Barbara Gordon and Dove play larger roles in the story. Barbara’s past as Batgirl is known, she now uses a wheelchair and is the show’s resident computer expert (though she is not referred to as Oracle). Dove is expected to have a significantly different look on the show (not a huge loss, in my opinion), and also to have a romantic attachment to her partner, Hawk.
Hank Hall (Hawk) and Dick Grayson (Nightwing) round out the minority dude coalition for the pilot, with Dick Grayson serving as a Boston-based detective, not unlike his occasional comics secret identity as a beat cop in Gotham’s neighboring city Blüdhaven.
Nerdist also reports we can “expect some kind of love triangle with [Starfire and] Nightwing and Barbara Gordon should the series go forward,” but they don’t give much evidence for it other than all three characters are in the show and both women have dated Dick Grayson in the comics. So… so I guess I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping the show won’t be that boneheaded.
Aside from the shockingly progressive dominance of female characters in a show that isn’t explicitly about the experiences of women (although to be fair, if Raven and Starfire are merely used as teasers at the end of the pilot, we’re really looking at a 50/50 split), which would make the program entirely unique as far as live-action superhero adaptations in television or movies go, this cast lineup is not particularly shocking. There’s a heavy emphasis on placing characters from the Batman mythos at center stage, which Warner Bros. regularly rests its shows on. Hawk and Dove are a bit of an odd (or obscure, anyway) choice, but since the origin of their powers are, shall we say, complicated, metaphysical, and goofy as only comic books can produce, it’s hard to say that we know anything about how they’ll be translated to screen. (For the laymen, yes, Hawk is an aggressive, argumentative, judgmental crimefighter, and Dove is a pacifist vigilante. The concept is really that simple.)
And as for Starfire and Raven, I choose to look at it this way: it’s good to see Warner Bros. finally acknowledging that the generation of kids that made Teen Titans a five seasons and a movie success is old enough to have their childhood pandered to with a TV drama.
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