Taking a look at the current television landscape, it’s almost depressingly absent of vampires. Sure, Vampire Diaries only ended last week, and True Blood is returning to HBO soon and The Strain will debut on FX this summer…but I mean like right now! Luckily, IDW Entertainment and eOne Television have announced even more undead bloodsuckers will potentially be making their way to small screens everywhere with V-Wars, an adaptation of the anthology of the same name, co-written and edited by Bram Stoker Award-winning author Jonathan Maberry.
The first project from IDW and eOne’s recent co-production deal, V-Wars is being developed as a series, despite not having any networks in its coffin corner yet. It shouldn’t be too hard to attract interested parties though. The pilot will be written by the Emmy-nominated Tim Schlattman, who served as a writer and producer on Showtime's Dexter for much of its run. As well, the project is being executive produced by David Alpert and Rick Jacobs’ Circle of Confusion, who are behind AMC’s The Walking Dead and Nima Nourizadeh’s stoner action comedy American Ultra. Plus, eOne has ties to shows all across cable, so it won’t be surprising if AMC or (gulp) Syfy eventually gets behind this.
But before anything like that can happen, the show has to be interesting, right? Well that’s another of V-Wars’ strong suits. A fairly original and exciting take on the basic mythology, this tale is set into motion when an environmental disaster allows a long-dormant vampiric virus to be released into the world at large. But people aren’t just turning into generic, plasma-slurping monsters, as the virus affects people’s DNA in different ways. (I guess that means mime vampires in Paris, right? Mimepires?) You see, vampires used to walk the Earth long ago, until they were snuffed out by human hunting, and now I guess there’s something of a revenge coming. Remind me to wear my Kevlar scarf the next time I go out at night.
“V-Wars is a head on collision of real-world science, terrorism, special forces action, ethics, politics and an exploration of what defines us as human,” said Maberry in the official release. Honestly, he’s right. The book itself is a collection of stories – written by authors such as Gregory Frost, John Everson, Yvonne Navarro and Scott Nicholson, to name a few – that tell the story of the world at large, in nearly the same way that Max Brooks’ World War Z gave an oral history of the zombie takeover, but without the same level of polish. Still, it should make for multi-faceted TV viewing.
And if you’re interested in seeing this world live on, but don’t want to wait for the series to come to fruition, check out IDW’s new monthly V-Wars comic series, which debuted in April from Maberry and artists Alan Robinson and Jay Fotos.
Are you guys interested in seeing more vampires on the small screen, or do you just hang garlic on your TV to keep them away?
