You can’t keep a good amazon down. She just keeps on tryin’.
On Thursday, Vulture reported that the CW, Warner Bros., and DC Entertainment are developing a script for a new Wonder Woman TV show by veteran writer Allan Heinberg (Grey’s Anatomy, The O.C.) under the working title Amazon. This latest Wondy-centric small screen attempt comes about a year after the last one failed from famed TV creator David E. Kelley.
The article doesn’t name sources, so it’s basically a rumor, but if it’s true, we could be in the early stage of something big for the most famous superheroine in comics.
Heinberg, who also wrote five issues of Wonder Woman’s comic a few years back, is penning a version of Princess Diana’s story that’s never been televised before. It will focus on young Diana as an up-and-coming superhero before she’s the established Wonder Woman we know and love. (Sort of like Smallville focused on a young Clark Kent before he became Superman).
That means origin story, but Vulture points out that it could come with a soapy spin. After all, Heinberg worked on Grey’s Anatomy and The O.C., so, y’know, there could lots of angst and all that stuff. Heinberg also wrote the popular Young Avengers comic book for Marvel, which featured a group of teen superheroes and the expected amount of emo shenanigans.
Wonder Woman has had an interesting time in TV land. Her live-action 1970′s TV show is iconic, but it’s been tough for her to reclaim her spot in network cinema ever since. It took more than three decades for her 2011 show to come along, and it was killed after the pilot failed to impress. Now we have this one, and it’s too early to know if it will become something substantive.
Wonder Woman has had a better time elsewhere, though. She was featured in the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited animated series’, and she has been a fixture in comic book adventures since the 1940s. Her most recent comic book stories by writer Brian Azzarello have been critically praised and garner healthy sales. This year alone, she’s received media buzz for her budding, in-comic romance with Superman, and you can bet she’ll pop up in a Justice League movie once it finds a director. So you definitely can’t say that Wondy hasn’t been getting attention.
If Heinberg’s vehicle is the one to drive Wonder Woman out in front for a new generation of viewers, then it could be great:
- He’s a great writer who understands comic books and TV, and a show with a young protagonist is definitely in his wheelhouse;
- The CW knows how to sustain long-running shows about younger characters, and the fact that it’s a lower-rated network than the big four (ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX) means that a Wonder Woman show wouldn’t need gangbusters ratings to survive, increasing its chances of staying on air; and
- DC proved with Smallville that it can leverage a successful television show with one of its characters, and it may do so again with Arrow (which debuts next month), so it may know how to do that with Wonder Woman.
About Hilton Collins
Loves all things science fiction and fantasy, and if he had to choose between video games, comic books, movies, TV shows and novels, he’d have a brain aneurysm. Check out his blog at www.superheroesareawesome.com. Twitter: @HiltonCollins
