If there’s one reliable fallback option for television networks beside Charlie Sheen, it’s the comic book superhero origin story. While occasionally you’ll have the odd failure like “Birds of Prey,” shows like “Smallville” have continually pulled in a decent audience season to season. Now, as CW’s “Arrow” becomes the latest to make it to the small screen, the same network is planning to bring another evocative DC Comics property back into the fray.
Vulture report CW have brought Allen Heinberg, best known for exec-producing “Grey’s Anatomy,” to write and develop a new series based on Wonder Woman, entitled “Amazon.” Heinberg — a successful TV and comic writer, who re-launched the iconic character’s comic in 2006 with artist Terry Dodson — has been tapped for the project only a year after David E. Kelley tried to get a different version set up at NBC. That pilot, which starred "Friday Night Lights" actress Adrianne Palicki was widely panned, and the new series will eschew the flashy costumes and campy charm of Lynda Carter’s version that finished in 1979, and Kelley's take, and instead focus on Diana of Themyscira’s early days of crime-fighting.
There is no pilot or series contractual agreement for “Amazon” at this point, so it could very well spin into the same fate that befell Joss Whedon’s big-screen Wonder Woman adaptation from a few years back, (and, potentially, the new big-screen take being penned by Michael Goldenberg now). However, if “Amazon” does manage to make it to series, it will join the ranks of successful comics-turned-CW properties alongside “Smallville” and “Arrow” (which has garnered some decent buzz), and potentially help to pave the way for that "Justice League" movie that's in the works too. [Vulture]