David E. Kelly‘s announced Wonder Woman television show has been shopped around to networks… and nobody’s buying.
According to Deadline Kelly’s pilot script
was reportedly taken out to the broadcast networks on Wednesday night. Fox and ABC passed, while WBTV’s sister network the CW could not afford it…
This left CBS and NBC in play. I hear the CBS executive team was split, while the fluid situation at NBC where new programming chief Bob Greenblatt is yet to take the reins, made it impossible to get the type of license fee that the studio was seeking in order to do the show Kelley had envisioned.
The reason why ABC passed on the pilot is of course because of the network’s association with Disney, who are now the big media company behind Marvel comics. ABC is currently working on three different Marvel-based television shows, and nobody wants to cross the streams of the Big Two.
Color me ambivalent.
David E. Kelly has enough writing chops with women in mind that I was never really worried that the show would offend me as a woman, just as a comic book nerd (for example, if there were no superpowers in it), but his attachment to the project gave me no greater enthusiasm than the simple news that Warner Bros. was shopping a Wonder Woman show to networks by itself.
Is it better that there be no Wonder Woman show at all, than there be a mediocre one? …I don’t really know. On the one hand, I think the presence of the more diverse elements of the superhero genre in the mainstream is a good thing. (Yes, sadly, in the comic book world, femininity is diversity.) On the other… Birds of Prey was a terrible, terrible adaptation that no one even remembers.
Well, lets just see how that Raven show turns out.
(via Deadline.)
