X-Men: The (fan fic) Series

Joss Whedon gets to write a live action fan fic tv series… cause seriously… once the comics moved away from their original creators, everything became fan fic, professional fan fic, but fan fic none the less. Doubly so when you get a writer who is obviously a fan of the original.

Deadline reports that the live-action tv series that’s been talked about since Avengers blew away the box office has been greenlighted and it will center around S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. This is smart because it fits in universe without actually needing to pay the big names for anything more than perhaps the occasional cameo.

Am I looking forward to this? Yes and no. For one, the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in this show are going to be either brand new originals or minor ones from the comics which only diehards would know about. So Joss has the task of making characters that are going to have to be appealing to an audience who mostly only know S.H.I.E.L.D. from the movies and it didn’t exactly have a large role.

I say this because the tv audience is much larger than the movie audience and the movie audience is larger than the comic fan audience. It’s the same issue I have with my X-Men fan fic, if it where to be an actual tv series then the assumption has to be made that most of the target audience would be made up of people who don’t exactly know who the X-Men are (and a few will probably accuse them of being a Heroes or Alphas rip-off) and the other main group will only know X-Men from the movies.

So a line has to be drawn, Joss’ show has to appeal to a much wider audience than Avengers did while at the same time pleasing movie and comic fans alike. By being mostly (if not all) original characters then he doesn’t fall into the traps that come with re-introducing known characters. Such as Captain America, comic fans know all his back history, movie fans know the history shown in the movies, but you’d still have to go through that in a tv show. You’d have to make sure people understood his origin without a) skipping over it so much you confuse/piss off those who don’t know and b) annoy those who do because it makes them think you think they are idiots.

Joss has created plenty of characters that we all know and love, he’s given us a great film in Avengers, so I’m excited to see where he will go with this, but it won’t be easy for him because he’ll have to create characters that get me interested beyond just being S.H.I.E.L.D agents.

Until we get more information, I’m going to be neutral to cautiously optimistic on this new Marvel endeavour.