In the latest new attempt to translate literary metafiction mega-mashup to a screen near you, Fox is looking to bring Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to television.
The network and its studio 20th Television have ordered up a "put pilot" of a new adaptation of the graphic novel series, which means the studio has already agreed to air it, screenplay unseen, or else incur penalties. The pilot will be written and executive produced by Michael Green, who has written and produced for the likes of Heroes and Smallville. (According to The Hollywood Reporter, which broke the story, Moore and O'Neill will not be producers on the series.)
All of this, of course, raises the question: Um … how? Yes, several of Moore's works have been adapted to mainstream media, including Watchmen and V for Vendetta, but League of Extraordinary Gentleman is a particularly odd choice for the small screen. The graphic novels essentially revolve around a conglomeration of Victorian age literary characters like Dr. Jekyll, Allan Quatermain, Dracula's Mina Harker, and the Invisible Man, who form a super-group to battle supernatural crime. That seems cool enough for a TV show, but the graphic novels are rife with contextual references so esoteric that even regular readers require annotations.
"League is not something that is going to appeal to the lowest common denominator of TV viewer; the series assumes a level of cultural literacy on the part of its readers that just isn't present," said Jess Nevins, who wrote volumes of the aforementioned annotations for the graphic novel series. "League is in most respects a satire of Victorian English attitudes—towards ethnicity, sex, adventure fiction itself, and so on—and that type of satire and sensibility won't do well on American TV screens without alteration. (Just as the British Office had to be Americanized to succeed here)."
That doesn’t mean that a TV show couldn't succeed, Nevins said, but the show's creators will have to make a lot of changes to the story for it to translate. (Note this was attempted once before in a 2003 film adaptation starring Sean Connery as Quatermain that was, well, not great.) Other TV shows—like Smallville, which plays in the DC Comics/Superman world fairly well—have been able to turn already-known characters into good TV fodder, Nevins added, but there are pitfalls.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen show certainly won't be alone in its quest to put a new twist on old characters – shows like the fairytale-themed Once Upon a Time and Grimm have been doing it with a fair amount of success. And next fall, NBC is dipping into the pseudo-Victorian well with its series Dracula, which isn't an adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel from whence Mina Harker comes as it is a new version of the infamous vampire's tale. However, most of those properties deal with characters that are household names and not all the lit-nerd stories referenced in League are as well-known.
"If the writers/producers expect the audience to recognize Quatermain/Invisible Man/Mina Harker/etc. in the same way that viewers of Once Upon A Time recognize Snow White, Prince Charming, et al, then the TV show will fail," Nevins said.
Is he right? We'll know soon enough. Since the call for Gentlemen is a put pilot order, the initial episode will get made, and Fox has to air it even if they don't order the show to go to series. So we'll just have to wait and see.
