Proving Once Again You Can Never Believe a TV Executive About Anything.
Remember last August when CW head honcho Mark Pedowitz told us that his network was “full up” on super hero shows? Yeah, turned out he was telling everyone a great big fib. A whopper of one, to be more precise.
When the CW became the Supergirl’s new home after parent company CBS decided she wasn’t a fit alongside NCIS and a dozen CSI shows, Pedowitz told everyone that the CW was done adding superhero shows (particularly DC ones) to it’s dance card. After all, including Arrow, The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow, the CW’s super family expanded to four after the Girl of Steel landed there.
But last week the CW revealed they had given a possible home to a new live action Black Lightning series based on the DC comic book character of the same name. After Fox recently backtracked on its commitment to Black Lightning, the CW offered the show a lifeline by ordering a pilot episode. The move shouldn’t come as a surprise considering that Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schecter (the team behind the CW’s other four comic book shows and the Archie re-imagining Riverdale) will be producing Black Lightning. It’s worth noting that this is the third show that Berlanti and Schecter have begun at other networks that have found a potential home at the CW (Supergirl at CBS and Riverdale at Fox).
This isn’t the first addition the CW has made since Pedowitz’s statement last summer. It announced in January that it was resurrecting John Constantine via animation on their CW Seed streaming platform. The announcement that Matt Ryan, the actor who earned fan acclaim playing the charismatic warlock in the short lived NBC show, would voice Constantine nearly broke the Internet.
Constantine will give the CW Seed three animated shows, joining the already airing Vixen and the soon to be added Freedom Fighters: The Ray.
While it isn’t known which DC/TV “universe” Black Lightning will inhabit if it survives past the pilot phase (Supergirl takes place in a narrative universe separate from the CW’s other comic book shows, generally referred to as the “Arrowverse”), early details indicate the show may revolve around the original Black Lightning Jeff Pierce mentoring his headstrong daughter after he’s hung up his crime fighting boots. No word as of yet on casting or air dates for Black Lightning.
Image DC Comics
