Alex Proyas And Eureka Co-Creator Team Up For ABC Sci-Fi Project
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Writer/director Alex Proyas is no stranger to science fiction. After making a name for himself on The Crow, he’s gone on to helm Dark City, I, Robot, and Knowing. Now he’s taking his genre chops to television, teaming up with Eureka co-creator Jaime Paglia for a new series called Evolve. Proyas will direct and exec produce the pilot, while Paglia will exec produce and write the script.
Evolve is based on the Toxic City trilogy by British writer Tim Lebbon. The project will follow in the footsteps of Heroes and Alphas by exploring ordinary people who have gained extraordinary powers, with a nice dose of post-apocalyptic mayhem for good measure. Hopefully it will veer closer to Alphas than Heroes when it comes to the quality of the writing… Here’s the official description from Deadline:
Evolve is set two years after a mysterious biological agent is released over Los Angeles when the city is still deemed too toxic to inhabit and remains sealed off from the rest of society. A small group of ordinary citizens outside the quarantined zone, who do not believe the government’s story, embark on a mission to uncover the truth of what happened to their family members who were inside the affected area. What they discover is a world where once-ordinary humans now have extraordinary abilities and powerful government forces seek to destroy them.
Going back to the Alphas/Heroes comparisons for a moment, both of those shows have demonstrated that effects have advanced to the level that you can do a genuinely good superhero kind of show without it looking cheap or cheesy. The latter has also proven that, if the writing sucks, the special effects won’t save you.
While we’ve seen superhero shows before, and we’ve seen plenty of post-apocalyptic shows before — including two currently airing, The Walking Dead and Revolution — we haven’t seen a show that mashes those two genres together like Evolve proposes to do. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.
(The concept also reminds me a bit of Peter Clines’ superheroes vs. zombies series that began with Ex-Heroes.)
