Kevin Smith meets the Reaper

The news is so fresh and new that the man himself hasn’t blabbed about it yet on his blog, but Clerks maestro Kevin Smith will apparently bring his talents to television.

While he’s already appeared in front of the camera on the goggle box (a cameo in Veronica Mars and, if it gets picked up, a co-starring part in the US version of Manchild), and was behind a short-lived Clerks cartoon, this will mark his first real foray into directing live-action TV.

He’s apparently ready to step behind the camera for Reaper, a drama that focuses on one Sam Oliver, a 21-year-old slacker (you can see why it might appeal) who discovers that his parents sold his soul to the devil and now he has to make good on the debt by becoming Satan’s bounty hunter and retrieving escaped souls to send them packing back off to hell.

Hang on… Satan’s bounty hunter? Catching evil souls? If you can hear the distant sound of a motorbike and the roar of a flaming skull, it’s because Ghost Rider will shortly be arriving to reclaim this basic premise.

Still, if it does go ahead, it’ll hopefully give Smith a chance to stretch. Clerks II showed that he could do (a little) more than just point the camera at people flapping lips – let’s hope this makes up for all those action shots in Dogma where the camera cut away. And, unusually for the writer-director, he didn’t script this pilot. Those duties fell to Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters. Will this mean a whole new arm of his career? You never know… He’ll call action this March in Vancouver.