Chew Comic Adaptation No Longer With Showtime

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

Chew

It seems like as many times as entertainment news overwhelms me with positive feelings, there is a bottomless vat of swirling disappointments just waiting to drown me in sorrow. This happens consistently when it comes to adaptations. Either the projects fall through, or they end up leaving out your favorite part. The biggest examples of both, for me, are the failure to give Locke and Key the TV time it deserves, and half of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film. Notice how those are both comic references? Well, here’s another.

The super-amazing surreal sci-fi action-packed comedic romp that is John Layman’s Chew had been in development at Showtime in recent months, after being in limbo for a couple of years. Now it’s back to limbo, as series writer/creator Layman took to Twitter to lay out the disappointing news.


Director Stephen Hopkins, whose most recent credits have been as director for the Showtime series House of Lies, was the creative force behind the adaptation, which could technically still find a network, I guess. The comics are creeping into mega-cult territory, and somebody like FX or Netflix maybe will probably jump all over this. The question is when.

According to a recent interview with the twistedly talented artist Rob Guillory, things were going pretty well.

We have an awesome script written by a great writer named Brian Duffield. It’s shockingly loyal to the comic. All the favorite characters are there, and the tone is dead on. Stylistically, it’s about as close as you can get to something as weird as Chew. So right now, we’re basically going back and forth with Showtime. Network stuff, which can move super-slow. But the good news is that we’re taking our time with it. If it does happen, it will be good. It won’t be something we just crap out.”

Lost‘s Ken Leung was in talks to play Tony Chu, the cibopath with the strange power of being able to “see” something’s history, from fried shrimp to fried people, just by tasting it. He works for the FDA, in a world where eating chicken has been outlawed. It’s one of the craziest and most fulfilling books out there, and it deserves to be seen. Somebody start a petition or something.