David E Kelley’s controversial reboot of Wonder Woman is a no go, but supernatural procedural and parallel realities drama get the green light
Since internet reaction to Ally McBeal creator David E Kelley’s proposed radical Wonder Woman reboot has almost uniformly negative, few will be sad to hear that US TV network NBC has decided not to take the pilot to a series.
According to Deadline , “Despite some negative early speculation, the pilot was not a disaster as some suggested. People who have seen it describe it as ‘ambitious’ and ‘well crafted’. But its screenings and testing were very mixed. ‘The audience couldn’t buy in the modernisation,’ one insider said. There were early signs of resistance against updating the classic franchise and the character when fans slammed the superhero’s new, contemporary costume. ‘It was a conceptual thing,’ another insider said. ‘Do we need a comic book hero?’”
Well, considering superheroes are box office gold at the cinema, that last statement seems a little shortsighted. Maybe we just didn’t need this version of a comic book hero. But if that’s the blinkered viewed of TV execs what, as Deadline ponders, will be the fate of the two Marvel superhero shows in development – Hulk and AKA Jessica Jones ?
But NBC has commissioned series from two other telefantasy pilots:
A wake , (previously known as REM ) starring Jason Isaacs, which is about a man who awakes after a car crash to find himself living in two different realities, one in which his wife survived the crash but not his child and the another where his child survived but not his wife.
Grimm , starring David Giuntoli (Privileged) as a detective whose mission is to protect humans living in a world where Grimm's Fairy Tale characters actually exist. Silas Weir Mitchell (Prison Break) plays a reformed big, bad wolf.
