Love & Money Dept – TV Writing Deals for 12/12/13

Latest News About Writers Who Are Doing Better Than We Are

  • Amanda Brotchie (Australia’s LOWDOWN) is writing the pilot for a U.S. version of the comedy project on E! (Considering how much we’ve enjoyed another Australia-to-U.S. comedy, WILFRED, we’re gonna look forward to this one.)
  • Drew Goddard (CLOVERFIELD) is developing DAREDEVIL for Netflix. (And considering that he also wrote and directed THE CABIN IN THE WOODS we find ourselves looking forward to this one too. A horror movie style Daredevil? You know it’s awesome.)
  • Al Gough & Miles Millar (SMALLVILLE) are adapting Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara books into a series for, of all places, MTV. (Two hits and then this obvious miss. Sword of Shannara? Worst inadvertent fantasy pastiche evah! SMALLVILLE? Most mind-numbing comic book adaptation evah! MTV committing to a majorly scripted series? Worst idea for a network push evah! Oyyy! Guess we’ve made ourselves clear here, huh?)
  • Alice Hoffman’s historical novel, The Dovekeepers, is being adapted into a CBS miniseries about “four extraordinary women whose lives intersect in a fight for survival at the siege of Masada.” (For us, this is a definite Pee-yoo cuz, well, for one thing we know going in that these women ain’t gonna survive because Masada=everybody dies; for another thing what happened to the men?; and for yet another thing…it’s being produced by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey. Which means that we know damn well that if we even tried to watch we’d never survive the first act.)
  • Chris Mundy (LOW WINTER SUN) has segued from his AMC series failure (by which we mean LOW WINTER SUN) to an overall deal with that very same network. (Cuz you know the old TV development saying, “Better the worst known quantity than the best unknown.” Yeppers, this is risk avoidance at its peak nadir.)