FX’s adaptation of the Brian Michael Bendis comic Powers seems to have been in development hell since television was invented. A superhero/cop show hybrid, starring Jason Patric as Christian Walker, a pilot was shot in 2011, but the last we heard of it – back in January – FX boss John Landgraf had requested “fairly substantial rewrites that would require pretty substantial reshoots” to the pilot and is waiting to see how those tweaks turn out before deciding if the project will go to a series.
Since then, nothing. We'd kinda given up on Powers , assuming the reshoots hadn’t fixed the problems and the show had been quietly shelved. But apparently not.
Brian Michael Bendis has posted his Tumblr : “Based on the pilot the network ordered a handful of new scripts for new episodes and the writers should be handing them in soon. It’s slow and steady but we are still alive.”
Additionally, an episode of Nerdist Writers Panel has just been posted that features Charles "Chic" Eglee, producer and head writer of Powers . The episode was actually recorded in April, just after news had broken that Eglee was to develop a TV version of Robert (The Walking Dead) Kirkman's Thief Of Thieves for AMC. In it Eglee says, “Unfortunately, the announcement of Thief Of Thieves this last week was interpreted by a lot of people that that somehow put Powers in limbo, and that's not the case at all. We're actively moving forward with Powers .”
Eglee also outlines how season one of Powers might look if it ever happens: “For those of you who know the comic at all, there's an installment called 'Who Killed Retro Girl?' and it just seemed to me that rather than wrap that up in a one-hour pilot, the thing to do was really let that be a whole season; the 13 episodes. Treat it as one murder investigation with weekly stories, self-contained narratives in each episode. But the big event – sort of like Murder One really – was solving that crime and using that to develop our characters and dramatise the world.
“We're not really hinging the show on the solving of that particular crime. It's really about Christian Walker's journey. This guy is... sort of The Man Who Fell To Earth. He was this Olympian god who had powers and was immortal, and he sort of got thrown out. And now, here he is walking the Earth with mere mortals and trying to put it together."
[via Comic Book Resources ]
