I have mixed feelings about Bill Willingham’s ongoing comic, Fables, and its spinoffs. On one hand, I find it to be funny and very creative but on the other hand, I think it readily lifts well-explored ideas from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series and novel, American Gods. Both of which take extremely fantastic characters of cultural mythology and plant them in these perfectly banal lives, living among the regular folk. I think the pros outweigh the cons, though, and on the whole, it’s good book. Other people tend to agree as it has acquired quite a following and follows the Vertigo conventions established by the writers who exemplify the very imprint (Moore, Gaiman, Morrison).
So color me surprised when I spotted this bit over at The Hollywood Reporter that ABC is developing a pilot based on the comic’s first arc, the murder of Snow White’s hard-partying sister, Rose Red. The story introduces the serieses best characters, Bureaucrat Snow White, Sherriff and reformed Big Bad Wolf, ultimate-douchebag Prince Charming and perennial pain-in-the-ass Jack of the Fables (who eventually spun off into his own monthly book). The pilot is being directed by David Semel who is credited with the outstanding pilot for Heroes (now in the depths of continuity hell) and written by Stu Zicherman and Raven Metzner who are sometimes associated with J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company and definitely associated with the ridiculously complicated series Six Degrees which failed to survive a single season.
Ordinarily, I might be excited about this prospect but there’s a big problem in the production crew and the fate of many recent shows featuring heavily plotted series arcs that attempt to emulate the success and depth of Lost. Many of the titles associated with the writers and director have wound up cancelled before a full season airs. Though it’s shows like Lost and Heroes that rescued us all from a full network schedule of reality TV, many of these shows are so deeply complicated and shitty that it’s difficult to sit through an entire episode let alone the entire season necessary to sink in and “get it”.
At the same time, though, this is the perfect format for a comic book adaptation. I dislike the notion of comics to movies because of how quickly character building, typically done over the long course of many, many issues is truncated into a single half hour act of a movie. On TV, it’s different. You can roll everyone out slowly, take your time, build characters and motivation over the course of an entire season of TV. With luck, Fables originally developed for the 2006 season, will get picked up and we’ll get to see what the results of this development is before it winds up on the mid-season bubble.
