DC has seen enormous success in the TV field recently: Arrow‘s an established cult hit, The Flash is a breakout hit, Gotham has been Fox’s highest rated drama in more than a decade, and they’ve got even more on the way. So now, apparently, they’ve decided to swing for the fences with Krypton. Yes, a TV show set on Superman’s homeworld.
The show, reported on by Bleeding Cool, has David Goyer developing it, and, honestly, it’s almost absurdly ambitious. It’s one thing to sell a show like Gotham, which is basically an over-the-top police procedural, and quite another to pitch what amounts to an SF pulp show which would require an enormous budget for television.
There’s actually quite a lot to draw from. Especially as DC let writers like John Byrne and Alan Moore loose on Superman, the culture of the Man of Steel’s home planet got complex and very weird. It’s a planet full of vicious animals, semi-Objectivist committees, death cults, and people running around in battle armor. Arguably the opening of Man of Steel best captured the sheer pulpy strangeness at play on the planet of Krypton. Russell Crowe riding a dragon before jumping off into the vat where they keep a library in order to put it into his unborn son’s DNA is, for Kryptonians, a Tuesday.
What’s baffling here is why anybody thinks it would play. For this to remotely work at all, it would need to be that extremely rare beast, a prestigious, expensive SF series on American television. So I’m skeptical this will get further than a script about Jor-El or something. But it’s nice to see DC’s willing to take a swing for the fences now and again.