S.H.I.E.L.D. [Whedon]

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so this is happening....
io9 wrote:Joss Whedon reveals a few new details about his new S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show

The man behind this year's biggest blockbuster, Joss Whedon, is slowly starting to leak his ideas on the highly anticipated S.H.I.E.L.D. TV series.

In an interview with MTV Whedon dropped little hints, and explained that the show will be focused around new characters. So, no Maria Hill, probably.

"It needs to be its own thing," said Whedon. "It needs to be adjacent [to the MCU] but you don't want to do a show where you're constantly going, 'Iron Man just left, but he was totally here a minute ago.' You want them to do their own thing."

What does that mean exactly? Whedon continued:

"Well, what does S.H.I.E.L.D. have that the other superheroes don't? And that, to me, is that they're not superheroes," said Whedon. "But they live in that universe. Even though they're a big organization, that [lack of powers] makes them underdogs, and that's interesting to me."

Given Whedon's well-known love for the underdogs, this puts this show right in his sweet spot. We can't wait for more information about this project.

Re: S.H.I.E.L.D. [Whedon]

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The cameo potential, both character and actor-wise, is pretty spectacular. I assume most people around here weren't Buffy/Angel fans; I wasn't until I married one, around Season 6 of Buffy/Season 4 of Angel, and I can tell you I was immediately struck by the fact that, unfamiliar characters aside, these were both the best comic book style television series ever put on networks. Superhero ensembles with plenty of weaknesses, good villains, snappy dialogue, regular action, individual episodes that always blossomed into great season long arcs by the end (which, when the series launched in the late 90s, wasn't exactly standard operating procedure outside of TP/X-Files). Not only was he the perfect guy to do The Avengers based on this experience, he's a really perfect guy to get a show like this going.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: S.H.I.E.L.D. [Whedon]

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Whedon's ability sits better in a television format, without the demand for wall-to-wall action scenes. Ergo, this looks better than the Avengers. On the other hand, I'm so sick of fucking superheros that I do hope you're right.

Re: S.H.I.E.L.D. [Whedon]

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My only problem with this is that the cast looks particularly bland, I would be more encouraged if he'd recycled half his actors from prior shows (J. August Richardson from Angel looks like a high point). Going big on ABC instead of slumming on Fox or the CWB or whatever the fuck that network is seems to have test audienced this casting into bland land. No wonder they dragged Coulson (because he's not bland!) back from the cinematic grave to spice things up. Still, I'll give it a chance if it employs enough of the Whedon genre t.v. charm. He's pretty good at this shit, for what it is.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: S.H.I.E.L.D. [Whedon]

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That's a terrible promo, but we are of course still talking about a network show they're trying to cross market to literally everyone, so it doesn't surprise me. Just saw one on said network that was better.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: S.H.I.E.L.D. [Whedon]

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NYT wrote:For Marvel, a Tricky Gene Transfer
‘Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ Hopes for a TV Audience

LOS ANGELES — How do you take a story born in comic books that most people know from the movies and successfully adapt it for television?
If you’re ABC and Marvel Entertainment, very, very carefully.

“Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” a science-fiction drama about a human espionage agency that interacts with superheroes, arrives on Sept. 24 amid a full-fledged Hollywood hype-nado. And understandably so: The series is a spinoff of “The Avengers,” a movie that took in $1.5 billion worldwide last year, selling roughly 78 million tickets in North America alone. If 28 percent of those ticket buyers tune in for the first episode, “S.H.I.E.L.D.” will rank as the highest-rated new drama in a decade — which would be a huge win for ABC, which is in need of fresh hits.

But television shows, unlike movies, prove themselves not on their marketing-amplified arrivals but week after Nielsen-scrutinized week. And Marvel, which has never made a live-action series before, faces breathtaking challenges by that measure.

About 75 percent of new programs on the broadcast networks fail to make it past a single season, killed by competition from the Web and cable (and sometimes by plain old bad writing). Marvel and ABC are trying to pull off the hardest trick in television: marrying two mismatched audiences. Marvel has a largely male fan base; ABC is the female-focused land of “Dancing With the Stars” and the soapy “Scandal.”

“To succeed,” said Jeph Loeb, Marvel’s top TV executive, “we’ve got to tell stories that appeal not just to what we affectionately refer to as the Marvel zombies, but to a broader audience affectionately referred to at ABC as the ‘Scandal’ women.”

To achieve that ambitious goal — the safe strategy would be to pick one audience or the other — Marvel and ABC started with a direct-to-DVD short film called “Item 47.” Or, rather, Robert A. Iger did.

Last year, Mr. Iger, chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, which owns both Marvel and ABC, watched “Item 47” and spotted the ingredients of a TV show. (It’s rare for a chief executive, even in Hollywood, to involve himself in a fledgling series, but Mr. Iger did start his career at ABC in 1974, ultimately becoming its chairman.) In “Item 47,” which was released on “The Avengers” DVD, two ordinary citizens discover a weapon left behind by aliens; S.H.I.E.L.D., which stands for Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, steps in and saves the day.

With its intimate feel, the short film “personified what a Marvel live-action television show could be,” said Alan Fine, president of Marvel Entertainment. Joss Whedon, who directed “The Avengers” and has a TV resume that includes “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and the less-successful “Dollhouse,” agreed to help create a series and direct the pilot episode.

S.H.I.E.L.D. was invented by Marvel comic book writers in the 1960s and updated as a movie story line in 2008, when Agent Phil Coulson popped up briefly in “Iron Man.” Coulson, a goofy bureaucrat played by Clark Gregg, reappeared in movies like “Thor” and provided a crucial plot point in “The Avengers”: He died, motivating Iron Man, the Hulk and their pals to put aside their differences and fight as one.

Mr. Gregg, who became a fan favorite, returns from the dead in the new TV series. (How did Coulson survive? Producers say the explanation will come as the series unfolds.) In Mr. Gregg, ABC saw not only a talented actor but a comforting and familiar face. The hope is that female viewers in particular will remember him from his stint on the comedy “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” which ran on CBS from 2006 to 2010.

Familiarity also factored into the casting of Ming-Na Wen as Melinda May, a martial arts expert and pilot; Ms. Wen is still remembered from “ER.” But Mr. Loeb said that she was also hired to send a subtle signal to ABC’s audience.

“We were not afraid to hire an actress who is a little older than people might expect,” Mr. Loeb said of Ms. Wen, 49. “We wanted to say something with this role: Age doesn’t matter if you’re great at what you do.” The average ABC prime-time viewer is 53.4 years old, according to Nielsen data. (Mr. Gregg is 51.)

Mr. Loeb and his creative team made sure they also served up a piece of man candy, casting the buff newcomer Brett Dalton as a young agent. But the most important character — after Coulson, of course — is a woman, a young computer hacker named Skye (Chloe Bennet), who is new to the organization and thus able to serve as an audience proxy. “What does S.H.I.E.L.D. stand for?” she asks in the pilot episode.

Romance was another crucial ingredient. “Our long-running shows all boast complicated characters who are engaged in dynamic and rich relationships — both romantic and platonic — and ‘S.H.I.E.L.D.’ needs to do the same thing,” said Channing Dungey, ABC’s executive vice president for drama development. So there is a simmering chemistry between Skye and Mr. Dalton’s character, and the pilot episode suggests that Coulson and Melinda May have a past.

“Their biggest note after we presented the thing was they wanted to make sure that our investment in the characters and their interaction and their evolution was as big as the case of the week,” Mr. Whedon said of ABC.

“Relatability” is a term that ABC and Marvel executives use frequently in discussing the series. A broad array of viewers — those “Dancing With the Stars” grandparents and “Scandal” moms — must be able to connect with the supernatural stories. “People go to movies to escape,” Mr. Loeb said. “People watch television to be a part of something.”

It helps that many of Marvel’s stories are set in the human world; that city in “The Avengers” might look futuristic, but it’s still New York, not Gotham. Maurissa Tancharoen, an executive producer of the series and one of four women on its eight-person writing team, said the show would include additional touches that ground the stories even more deeply in reality. For instance, part of the first episode was filmed in Paris.

The series drew a time slot (Tuesdays at 8 p.m., Eastern and Pacific time) that in 2010 went to another new ABC superhero show, “No Ordinary Family.” That series did not come with a built-in fan base, but it failed in part because ABC was insistent on turning it into a draw for women rather than trying to expand the network’s reach by going after men.

Paul Lee, who took over as president of ABC Entertainment after “No Ordinary Family” was already on the schedule, is keen to avoid that trap. So he has also encouraged the writers not to skimp on fanboy treats. For instance, Coulson jokes about having been “shanked by the Asgardian Mussolini,” a reference to Loki, an evil Thor sibling who stabbed the agent in “The Avengers.”

The writing team has been told that certain Marvel superheroes are off limits — don’t expect Spider-Man, at work in a movie series for Sony, to show up anytime soon. But reams of lesser-known Marvel lore is at their disposal. To make sure that Marvel DNA is transported intact to television screens, the writers interact with a committee that includes creative executives from Marvel’s publishing and movie branches.

“We send our story ideas up to them and ask if they interfere with anything they want to do in the cinematic universe,” said Joss Whedon’s brother, Jed Whedon, who is also an executive producer of the series. (To make it even more of a family affair, Jed Whedon is married to Ms. Tancharoen.)

Marvel and ABC also appear to be spending lavishly, at least initially, on visual effects to bridge the gap between the cinematic splendor of “The Avengers” and the small screen. The first episode cost roughly $12 million to make, a princely sum for a pilot. But shooting in Paris doesn’t come cheap and neither does a flying convertible, Coulson’s preferred method of travel.

“The next episode will be us stuck in an elevator, because they spent all the money,” Mr. Gregg said in July at a gathering of television critics.

As if the series weren’t ambitious enough, Marvel is also trying to turn back time when it comes to viewer habits and network promotion. Some network pilots are now posted online ahead of their television debuts to whet interest, but Marvel has gone to extreme lengths to keep its pilot under wraps. “As opposed to something that is shared in advance and reshared and spoiled and then unrevealed,” Mr. Loeb said, “wouldn’t it be great if everybody just got together on Tuesday nights and watched?”

Despite all the care put into “S.H.I.E.L.D.” by multiple cooks, many questions remain. For instance, how much cross promotion will there be between the show and Marvel movies like “Thor: The Dark World,” which arrives on Nov. 8?

“As much as we can allow,” Joss Whedon said. “We’re still working that out.”

To what degree will Mr. Whedon, who is directing an “Avengers” sequel, continue to be involved with the series? “As much as an executive producer can who is also making a movie,” he said. (Translation: He will contribute writing and management, but how much has yet to be seen.)

Will “S.H.I.E.L.D.,” an ambitious swing by ABC at a time when broadcast television urgently needs a breakout hit, live up to the hype?

That answer will come soon enough.
Just cut them up like regular chickens

Re: S.H.I.E.L.D. [Whedon]

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Being a bigger fan of the show-runners than you I guess I'm biased towards thinking it has every chance of being a very fine escapist entertainment. Buffy is definitely given due praise for helping lay the foundation for a lot of the great genre cable shows, as well as season-long story arcs/"mythology", that everyone's ga-ga over in this day and age. They know their comic books, they know their t.v., I'm pretty confident it'll be good.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

Re: S.H.I.E.L.D. [Whedon]

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I think it'll have good ratings the first week and then tank. Sci-fi/Fantasy rarely does well on mainstream network TV, even less so today. On cable I could see this working. On a major network, naw. It'll get canceled within six episodes and replaced with reruns of So You Think You Can Dance With America's Next Top Bachelor.
Just cut them up like regular chickens

Re: S.H.I.E.L.D. [Whedon]

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I think you're discounting the number of families who will take the opportunity to watch something exciting and fairly sanitized with their children. My two older kids are over the moon for a "grownup" show they're going to get to watch with mom and dad. They're still bitter we don't let them watch Once Upon A Time anymore, a show that couldn't decide on tone so one minute it would be sweet and syrupy and the next minute someone was getting beheaded.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."