For the longest time we’ve been excited about the news that Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming’s Powers was getting the television treatment by FX. But like many stupid things Fox does, the cable channel has passed on the series.
The FX adaptation would have starred Jason Patric as Detective Walker, a super-powered hero who lost his powers, and Lucy Punch as Detective Pilgrim, who investigate super-powered crimes together. According to statements made during the Television Critics Association press tour, the series would have had to undergo many reshoots before it would consider airing the program.
“We didn’t pick the pilot of Powers up; we went back and Chick Eglee, who had written it, did a fairly substantial rewrite that would require pretty extensive reshoots of the pilot,” said FX President and GM John Landgraf. “Right now we’re in the process of deciding whether to pull the trigger on the reshoot.”
With that statement, I’m going to guess the final nail has been hammered, and we’ll only see the pilot at a special showing at a comic book convention, just like the network did with Locke & Key last year.
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I wonder what the rewrites were? Did they want to completely change the series so that it was Powers in name only? Did they want a giant mechanical spider?
Maybe we’ll still get lucky and either another network will try to pick it up or they can salvage the footage into a direct-to-DVD movie.
FX used to be pretty dependable for quality cable originals like Rescue Me, Nip/Tuck, Sons of Anarchy, and (a personal favorite) It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Now, with the exceptions of Archer & maybe Sunny (the season finale this year felt like they wanted it to be the series closer but were told to keep going, which is always poisonous to a show), it seems like they’re not trying. They’re cancelling all of their good stuff and replacing it with stupid stuff like a scandal-baiting Charlie Sheen sitcom (to go with their new plan to run marathons of “Two & a Half Men” every damn day) or cancelling potentially good stuff before it can get off the ground. I’d like to see them go back to being one of the higher-quality basic cable channels as far as their originals, but whenever I see stuff like that, I get the feeling it ain’t gonna happen.