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WILDCARDS Television DealAugust 10, 2016
The Wild Cards Are Coming…to Television! We are proud to announce that Universal Cable Productions has acquired the rights to adapt the beloved mosaic novels Wild Cards and will begin development of the series into a what we all hope will be the first of several interlocking series. The TV series could be coming to your home screens in the next year or two and although GRRM is massively excited about the whole venture he himself won’t be working on the show. This is what he wrote on his Not a Blog in explanation “(M)y own development deal is exclusive to HBO, and I am writing The Winds of Winter, as I believe most of you will recall… but I have every confidence in Melinda Snodgrass and Gregory Noveck. They know and love the Wild Cards universe almost as well as I do, and I think they will do a terrific job.” Wild Cards is a 22-volume (to date) book series – the first volume published in 1986 – set in an alternate world. Martin’s blog describes Wild Cards thusly: “The shared world of the Wild Cards diverged from our own on September 15, 1946 when an alien virus was released in the skies over Manhattan, and spread across an unsuspecting Earth. Of those infected, 90% died horribly, drawing the black queen, 9% were twisted and deformed into jokers, while a lucky 1% became blessed with extraordinary and unpredictable powers and became aces. The world was never the same.” Translations and reprints of Wild Cards books and stories have been published around the globe, with comic books, graphic novels, and role-playing games also chronicling the adventures of the aces and jokers of the Wild Card universe. Universal Cable Productions, a part of NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment, will adapt the “anthologies and mosaic novels” for television, Martin said. “Melinda M. Snodgrass, my assistant editor and right-hand man on Wild Cards since its inception, the creator of Dr. Tachyon, Double Helix, and Franny Black, and a seasoned television writer/ producer whose credits include Star Trek: The Next Generation (“Measure of a Man”), Reasonable Doubts, The Profiler, and Star Command, is attached as an executive producer on the project, together with Gregory Noveck of RED, Slow Learner, and SyFy Films.” UCP programming includes Mr. Robot, Colony, Royal Pains and Suits, among many others. According to Martin’s site, writers, including himself, that have contributed to the Wild Card universe over three decades have included Howard Waldrop, Walter Jon Williams, Stephen Leigh, Victor Milan, John Jos. Miller, Gail Gerstner Miller, Edward Bryant and Leanne C. Harper, to name a very few. |
