Sharlto Copley and Susan Heyward star as homicide detectives Christian Walker and Deena Pilgrim in Powers, now streaming on the Playstation Network.
Sony Computer Entertainment America
Adapted from the highly successful comic by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Avon Oeming, Powers is a natural choice for televised adaptation: It’s got non-powered heroes, and a “gritty” tone and noir influence that are ripe for prestige-drama treatment. At heart, it’s a cop show, the most tried-and-true type of television on the books. It has a highly visible cast including District 9‘s Sharlto Copley as protagonist cop Christian Walker, Eddie Izzard as the villainous Wolfe, and The Killing‘s Michelle Forbes as superhero icon Retro-Girl. But where it’s “airing” isn’t on network, or basic cable, or HBO, or Netflix or Amazon Instant, or even other streaming platforms like Hulu or Crackle. It’s on Sony’s PlayStation Network, accessible only through the company’s videogame console (and select Xperia phones and Sony Bravia TVs).
Powers is, essentially, a very good piece of corporate synergy—the result of a strategic partnership between the PlayStation division of Sony and Sony Pictures. According to Sony Vice President of Platforms Marketing John Koller, the plan was originally made three years ago, after which the studio sent a selection of scripts for the PlayStation executives to play around. They settled on Powers.
But the road to Powers was much longer than that. After the title was originally optioned in 2000, soon after its debut on Image Comics (it later moved to Marvel’s imprint Icon), there were several failed attempts at adapting it as a feature. Much of the difficulty hinged on the fact that Sony saw it as a straight-ahead superhero property, while the book is much more about police work than costumed vigilantism. “If you’re looking for Spider-Man and you get Se7en, it’s a little tough,” Bendis says with a laugh. Finally, after many years (and several volumes’ worth of history for the comic), Powers entered the development pipeline at FX in 2011.
FX hired a small writers’ room to do a few scripts, eventually producing a pilot that was strong theoretically, but suffered from what current showrunner Charlie Huston calls “chemistry issues.” Even with a dynamite cast that included Corey Stoll and Titus Welliver, the characters reportedly weren’t quite believable together. Huston was one of those original writers; it was his script that Bendis responded to most enthusiastically, pushing for it to set the tone for the whole series.
And that’s where PlayStation came in. When the FX pilot was in limbo—Bendis describes network president John Landgraf as a “very contemplative man”—Sony Pictures came to Bendis and presented the PSN as an option, just in case the FX project never got off the ground. As soon as FX passed in early 2012, Sony greenlit the whole season. Now, 15 years after the publication of the first issue of Powers, it seems to have worked out pretty well for Bendis. “I’m very happy we have a show at the end of it.”
It’s also worked out for Sony. “Even launching an original content series equals a tremendous success for the partnership between Pictures and PlayStation,” Koller says; he sees the show, and any other like it that may come along, as a way to “supplement gaming” for the console manufacturer. Of course, trying to determine what would make Powers a success or failure leads into a thicket of buzzwords—“we want to incent PlayStation Plus adoption,” Koller says, but also create “sentiment among gamers.” After all, “positive sentiment about PlayStation the brand as well as about what Powers offers to them as members of PlayStation,” he says, “is very critical to how we’re doing this.” Above all, Sony is concerned with “how the brand lives in their heart.” From the marketing speak, it seems like Powers was plucked from the scrap heap to be a test subject in this grand experiment of brand convergence. Of course, from the creative side those choices appear a bit differently. “A promise was made, a promise was kept, and that’s a very rare thing in this world,” Bendis says.
By the end of the show’s first three episodes, Powers seems to be in a good space. Even with Hannibal‘s David Slade behind the camera for the first two episodes, it doesn’t quite look up to par with its cable competition, but it still manages to stakes out a thematic space that overlaps with the source material without duplicating it. (Look for a fuller review of the series on WIRED later this week.) But regardless of quality, the real question is: does being visible only on a videogame console—even when nearly 100 million Playstation 3 and 4 consoles have been sold worldwide—relegate a show to the sidelines?
Bendis doesn’t think so. “Over the last 15 years, and particularly these last five years, that audience has acclimated and learned all of the rules of the genre,” he says. In other words, the inundation of superhero shows means that audiences are well-primed for Powers. “We’re going to murder the superhero and start our story from there, which they’re not going to do on The Flash,” he says. They’re not going to murder The Flash and do an autopsy. I love that show, but they’re not going to do that.” And that might augur what Bendis sees as possible changes in the TV landscape at large: “I’m surprised all sitcoms haven’t turned into Childrens Hospital—all 15 minutes long, all oblique references.”
Notably, PlayStation hasn’t decided whether it’s going to keep making original content—a second season of Powers, a different series, or stopping altogether. Is this an experiment? a dumping ground? No one seems to know for sure. But Huston has several seasons’ worth of ideas for how to expand the world, and Sony can easily coordinate creating more. That may or may not be a good idea—the first episode is a bit plodding, but the end of the second picks up before the third starts to crackle in a way that suggests a legitimately exciting, sensible TV adaptation. If the rest of the season is more along the lines of that third episode, more made-to-order Powers wouldn’t be such a bad thing. After all, what isn’t corporate synergy these days?
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