Universal Cable Productions is developing a TV show based on Wild Cards, a series of novels set in a shared universe created by Melinda Snodgrass and Game of Thrones’ own George R.R. Martin, Variety reports. The series debuted in 1987 when Snodgrass and Martin used a long-running campaign of superhero-themed role-playing game Superworld as the basis of a universe that 31 science-fiction writers—known as the “Wild Cards Trust”—have since used as the setting for short stories and novels. Martin served as the gamemaster of the original game and edited the first 17 books in the series; Snodgrass began serving as assistant editor starting with 2006’s Death Draws Five. The first volume, only recently back in print, hit stores in 1987 to virtually no press attention, although it got a good review in Wilmington, Delaware’s News Journal, where accidental prophet-of-doom Michael Hagen headlined a joint review of the series and Watchmen, “Superheroes Get Deserved Respect.” (Martin was at the height of his television career at the time, going from The Twilight Zone to Beauty and the Beast.)
The Wild Cards series is set in a world where, shortly after World War II, an alien virus was released into the atmosphere, causing death, horrifying mutations, and, for a lucky few, superpowers. The first book is a blend of short stories and fake documentary interludes (like an oral history supposedly written by Studs Terkel); later volumes included straightforward novels fleshing out the characters. Martin won’t actually be working on the television adaptation because of his exclusive contract with HBO; instead, co-creator Snodgrass, who has written for Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Outer Limits, will be executive producing with Gregory Noveck.
Wild Cards was previously in development at SyFy Films in 2011; that version was intended to be a theatrical feature, with Snodgrass writing and Noveck producing. Noveck’s shared universe credentials go back more than a decade: He was Time Warner’s original hire to find ways to exploit the DC Comics universe on film and television back in 2003. In 2011, he told the Hollywood Reporter that Wild Cards was “beyond Marvel and DC, really the only universe where you have fully realized, fully integrated characters that have been built and developed over the course of 25 years.” Martin shares this feeling, telling Variety, “… most of all it is a universe, as large and diverse and exciting as the comic book universes of Marvel and DC (though somewhat grittier, and considerably more realistic and more consistent), with an enormous cast of characters both major and minor.”
It’s unclear what the byzantine business transactions behind this deal were: SyFy, SyFy Films, Universal, and Universal Cable Productions all fall under the NBCUniversal corporate umbrella, itself a division of Comcast. But regardless of how the money and the deck chairs are being shuffled around, it is clear that the singularity is approaching: episodic television, about superheroes, in a shared universe, created by George R.R. Martin, “as large and diverse and exciting as the comic book universes of Marvel and DC.” It’s enough to make you wish someone would release an alien virus into the atmosphere.
