BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER legacy sequel show announces main cast

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot pilot is moving ahead at Hulu, with the streamer announcing the show's primary cast in recent days.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is indeed returning to her signature role of Buffy Summers, whom she played over the original show's seven seasons and 144 episodes from 1997 to 2003, as well as making additional appearances in spin-off Angel. Gellar is also an executive producer on the new show. She was resistant to returning to the role for many years, but apparently changed her mind after rewatching the original show with her teenage children. It is unclear if she'll be a series regular, recurring actor or even just a guest star in the pilot alone.

15-year-old Ryan Kiera Armstrong (one of the best performers in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew) has been cast as the series lead. Armstrong, who has also appeared in American Horror Story, IT: Chapter Two and Black Widow, will be playing a new Slayer who is told she has to save the world from the forces of darkness.

In the original Buffy, only one Slayer was "active" at any one time, imbued with super-strength and superior reflexes to take on the vampires. Buffy's brief "death" at the end of Season 1 allowed a second Slayer to become active (first Kendra and then Faith). At the conclusion of Season 7, Buffy was able to change the laws of reality so every single "potential" Slayer could become a full Slayer immediately, forming an entire army to save the world. Whether this change was permanent was unclear (though spin-off comics suggested it was).

The other announced cast members are Faly Rakotohavana as Hugo, Ava Jean as Larkin, Sarah Bock as Gracie, Daniel di Tomasso as Abe and Jack Cutmore-Scott as Mr. Burke.

Nora Zuckerman and Lila Zuckerman are the writers, showrunners and executive producers. Chloé Zhao will direct the pilot and produce. Fran Kuzui and Kaz Kuzui, who produced both the TV series and the original 1992 movie and own the rights, are returning as producers. Dolly Parton and her Sandollar production company will also produce; they worked on the original TV series.

At the moment only Gellar has been confirmed to return from the original cast, though the door is apparently open to many of the others returning if the pilot gets a full season pickup. Sadly, this will not be possible for Michelle Trachtenberg (who played Buffy's younger sister Dawn), who passed away in February.

The pilot is expected to shoot over the next couple of months with Hulu expected to make a decision on a full season order shortly after that.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER legacy sequel series in development

A new Buffy the Vampire Slayer project is in development at Hulu. This is not really surprising, with multiple attempts to resurrect the franchise having been discussed since not long after it concluded the first time around in 2003. However, this attempt appears to be closer to a pilot deal than any of the others, and is the first to have Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, attached in an official capacity.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer started as a movie script written by Joss Whedon. The resulting film, released in 1992 and starring Kristy Swanson and Donald Sutherland, did poorly at the box office but found a dedicated cult fanbase on home video. This led to a TV show being picked up by Fox in 1996, for airing on The WB starting the following year, with Whedon as showrunner and Gellar in the starring role. Buffy the Vampire Slayer ran for seven seasons (ending in 2003) and 144 episodes, winning both critical and commercial acclaim for its canny mixture of supernatural fantasy, horror, drama and light comedy. Its spin-off show, Angel, ran for five seasons and 110 episodes from 1999 to 2004.

Although the story continued in comics, attempts to resurrect the franchise in other formats failed. Spin-offs focusing around the characters of Spike (James Marsters), Giles (Tony Head) and Faith (Eliza Dushku) were in development at one time or another, but none made it off the ground.

In 2010 an attempt to reboot the franchise as a new movie series foundered, whilst a 2018 attempt at a total reboot with Whedon producing and Monica Owusu-Breen showrunning also failed to gain traction. Whedon's subsequent fall from grace for alleged toxic behaviour on the sets of his various projects seemed to stall any further development on projects closely associated with his name.

Sarah Michelle Gellar distanced herself from the show after its conclusion, not attending conventions and gently discouraging speculation over a reboot or sequel with herself involved. She starred in two Scooby Doo movies with husband Freddie Prinze Jr., as well as Cruel Intentions and The Grudge, and occasional TV work, most recently Paramount+'s Wolf Pack. She has mainly focused on business interests outside of television and film. However, she recently spoke of Buffy more warmly having sat down to watch the show with her own children for the first time, and found the experience rewarding.

The new iteration of the show being discussed is a successor series which will focus on a new regular cast, with Gellar's Buffy and possibly other actors from the original series appearing in recurring roles. Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao (Eternals, Nomadland) is being touted as a producer, writer and possibly director for some episodes. Nora Zuckerman and Lila Zuckerman (Poker Face, Prodigal Sons, Agents of SHIELD, Fringe) will produce and showrun. Rights-holders Fran Kuzui and Kaz Kuzui (who produced the 1992 film) will produce alongside Dolly Parton, whose production company worked on the original series. Whedon is not involved at this time.

The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended with Buffy finding a way of creating more Slayers, allowing others to take over the burden of saving the world and allowing her to have a vacation. Some of the spin-off media posited that Buffy would effectively become a mentor to a whole new generation of Slayers, and working more in the capacity of a general directing her forces against larger threats. Whether this project would go in a similar direction, or return to the status quo of a single Slayer, remains to be seen.

Atlanta: Season 4

Paper Boi and his friends have returned to Atlanta after the end of his European tour. Back home, they find the same old same old, leading Earn to make a momentous decision.

Atlanta's MO has always been to use surrealism and even horror to illuminate what should have been a fairly basic premise: an Atlanta rapper hits the big time and hires his more grounded cousin to become his manager. The show not so much lowballs as absolutely forgets about that premise on a fairly regular basis to tell unrelated stories about everything else under the sun. In the third season, the show even chucked out its regular cast for almost half its run to become an anthology show.

The fourth and concluding season of the show returns to Atlanta and what vaguely approximates its standard format, of following its four main characters as they consider the next stage of their lives, such musings interrupted by horrendously awkward social situations, ill-considered monetary decisions and continuously pervasive racism.

If this was any other show, it'd be easy to say this was a "back to basics" season, but Atlanta's boundless inventiveness makes that a fairly meaningless statement. In the first episode alone, Darius is targeted by a scooter-bound woman who mistakes his genuine attempts to return an unwanted air fryer to Target during a riot as looting, Al follows an insane Scavenger Hunt to attend the funeral of his idol, and Earn and Van get lost in a mall seemingly inhabited by all of their ex-partners, forcing them into increasingly cringey small talk. Later episodes feature Earn undertaking one of the most elaborate and expensive petty revenge schemes in human history, Al being sucked into the terrifying world of managing young white rappers and Van getting stuck on a filming lot by a deranged showrunner (any similarities to real-life figures, of course, coincidental).

Compared to the third season's four anthology episodes unrelated to the main premise, this episode throws up only one, creating a fictitious alternate history where a junior animator is accidentally promoted to the CEO of Disney in 1992 and sets about making "the blackest movie of all time," which turns out to be the underrated animated masterpiece A Goofy Movie. Presented as a mockumentary with talking heads (a mixture of real-life figures and fictional Disney staff) and an undetectable dividing line between comedy and pathos, the episode is both hilarious and heartbreaking. It's also remarkable to see Disney (via FX) bankrolling and then showing something so critical of Disney.

The show ends, not with a bang or some kind of major climactic event (despite teasing Earn leaving the gang for Los Angeles all season), but instead a pretty ordinary day for the team, "ordinary" doing some heavy lifting as a concept there. The gang are stuck in a posh restaurant with arty food but are distracted by the proximity of a popular chicken fast food joint, whilst Darius undergoes a self-imposed existential crisis which can only be remedied by determining the dimensions of Judge Judy's posterior. Obviously.

Atlanta's final season (*****) is a well-deserved victory lap, the creators taking everything they've done so far and assembling a final ten episodes which are as inventive, bizarre and amusing as anything they've done to date. They don't go quite as random as the third season, but still keep up the consistency to a very high level. Walking away after such a run of episodes seems both crazy but also so Atlanta. We need more shows which are as fearless and unbound as this one (only channel-mate Reservation Dogs seems to be willing to go as far at the moment), but at least we have the forty-one episodes of this show to fall back on in the future. It's been a ride.

The entire run of Atlanta is available on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ in most of the rest of the world.

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Atlanta: Season 3

Paper Boi and his manager, Earn, have arrived in Europe for a tour and are soon joined by their friends Darius and Van. What should be a straightforward series of gigs becomes increasingly weird and convoluted, whilst Earn has a series of vivid dreams about what appear to be horror stories or alternate realities. Outside of the comfort zone of Atlanta, the group find themselves adrift.

Atlanta is a show that defies easy definitions. The project, headed by Donald Glover in collaboration with his brother Stephen and visionary director Hiro Murai, flirts with a standard setup where Glover plays the under-achieving cousin of a rising rap star, and manages to talk him into letting him become his manager. Shenanigans ensue. But the show undercuts, subverts or often just flat out ignores its own premise on a very frequent basis, dropping most of the cast to focus on one character, or forgetting its alleged status as a comedy-drama to instead turn into flat-out existential horror. In its first two seasons the show navigated these fluctuations with ease and verve.

For its much-delayed third season (arriving four years after the last), Atlanta flips the last vestiges of its format out the window. The gang are now in Europe, as Paper Boi's latest tour takes in Copenhagen, Amsterdam and London, among other cities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, even this is not as straightforward as it could be as Paper Boi experiences the worst trip of all time, Earn has to interrogate a suspected phone thief, Darius inadvertently destroys his favourite restaurant in London and Van experiences an identity crisis in Paris.

These voyages into the surreal - and they are even surreal by Atlanta's elastic standards of reality - are meticulously-crafted, intelligent slices of drama, comedy and horror intertwined with the show's traditional verve. But there are also only six episodes of them, in a ten-episode season. The show dedicates the remaining four episodes to almost completely stand-alone anthology stories.

The first is a flat-out horror, as a young boy's teacher mistakenly identifies him as being the victim of child abuse at home and he gets cycled into the care system, with decidedly unpleasant results. In the second, white Americans who are the descendants of slave-owners are forced to pay reparations to the descendants of their slaves, resulting is a seismic shift in society, and one white man rails against the new system. In a third episode, a white couple are completely reliant on their Trinidadian nanny are inconvenienced by her death, but baffled when their son asks to go to her funeral. This draws them into the life of someone they never really knew and barely ever thought about. And in the final story, a mixed-race, white-presenting high schooler is incensed when he loses out on a scholarship because of his appearance, leading to a questionable strategy for retaliation.

These four stand-alone episodes are each impressive - Three Slaps may emerge as Atlanta's creepiest instalment - and delve into themes the show has tapped into before, but in a freer way when they are detached from the show's normal cast and continuity. The Big Payback goes as far as taking place in a fantastical alternate-timeline. And all four episodes are hinted to be unusually vivid dreams that Earn is having during the European tour. It doesn't really matter since Atlanta has only a passing interest in making itself even vaguely realistic (remember this is a show which once featured an invisible car for the sheer hell of it). Instead, the stand-alones enhance the themes of the rest of the series, dealing with class, ambition and the complexities and hostility of interracial relations in America (and elsewhere). That they are brilliantly-written and directed is taken as read, but some may bemoan the limited screentime we have for our regulars; the last episode is almost a one-hander for Van (who herself is absent from most episodes), meaning that Earn, Darius and Paper Boi sit out a full half of the season.

That sounds churlish to the point of ridiculousness - who, by its third season, is watching Atlanta for a conventional narrative with a regular cast? - but there is also a slight sense of queasiness this season, of unease beyond the show's norm. The show is at its boldest and most experimental here but sometimes it feels like the experiments don't always pay off. Paper Boi being suckered into helping a company avoid corporate fall-out for its racism feels predictable, and the normally-affable Darius spends most of the season in a surprisingly dark place. The show complicating its (normally) most likeable character is a good move, but making him as dislikeable as they do here (particularly when he just bounces on Paper Boi, leaving him to the night from living hell) feels like a misstep. Van also spends most of the season on an extended strange journey separate to the rest of the characters, which feels initially disappointing - Zazie Beetz is the show's ultimate weapon of a performer, often floating around the fringes of episodes until she becomes the focus, when she absolutely kills it - but does pay off in the very clever finale.

Atlanta's third season (****½) is its boldest, strangest, weirdest, most scattershot and possibly patchiest. Perhaps you can even call it disappointing, in the same way that finding £500 on the street is disappointing after finding £600 the day before (twice!). But it's also maybe the most interesting and weirdly experimental of what is already an interesting and experimental show. The season is available to watch on Hulu in the USA and Disney+ in the UK.

FUTURAMA revival ordered at Hulu

Animated SF sitcom Futurama is returning with new episodes for Hulu. The streamer has ordered a 20-episode eighth season of the show, which last aired new episodes in 2013 (although a Simpsons/Futurama crossover episode aired in 2014).

Created by Simpsons creator Matt Groening, Futurama debuted in March 1999 and ran for four seasons on Fox. Although critically acclaimed, the show never attracted audience figures close to that of The Simpsons and was cancelled in 2003. Comedy Central subsequently resurrected the show with four feature-length episodes in 2008, which were later split into four episodes apiece to make up fifth season. Comedy Central then commissioned two more seasons which aired from 2010 to 2013 before cancelling the show again. The show won six Emmy Awards during its time on the air.

Groening has subsequently created the animated fantasy comedy Disenchantment for Netflix, which released its fourth set of episodes today.

Groening and Futurama producer/developer David X. Cohen are producing the revival. Most of the original cast will return, with the only outstanding actor currently being John DiMaggio, who voiced sarcastic, alcoholic robot Bender. Hulu are currently negotiating with DiMaggio, but are willing to recast if necessary.

Production of the new season will begin this month, to air in 2023.

Only Murders in the Building: Season 1

A fire alarm sounds in the Arconia apartment building in Manhattan. Three residents find themselves sharing a table at a nearby restaurant: semi-retired actor Charles-Haden Savage, Broadway director Oliver Putnam and Mabel Mora, a young woman renovating her aunt's apartment. The three bond over a shared fascination with true crime podcasts. When they discover that one of their neighbours was murdered during the fire alarm and the police seem undermotivated to investigate, they decide to look into it themselves...and host a podcast along the way.

A lot of TV shows, even in this modern age where it feels like everything has to be an instant hit, take a while to find their feet, usually stumbling through trial and error in early episodes until they find a consistent level of quality. The rarest of things in TV is a show that arrives absolutely fully-formed and is a compelling watch right out of the gate. Excepting mini-series like Watchmen, the last show to have achieved that feat may have been the fantastic first season of Fargo six years ago.

However, that may have now been matched by the first season of Only Murders in the Building, a perfectly-executed show which knows exactly what type of story it wants to tell and the tone it needs to hit to get there, and simply does it.

The show combines three outstanding leading talents: American comedy god Steve Martin, his frequent collaborator and 1980s legend Martin Short (I still feel that Innerspace is underrated), and singer and actress Selena Gomez. Martin plays against type as an insular, restrained actor who had a hit cop show in the early 1990s but has never been able to replicate its success, and has trouble opening up to other people. Short's Putnam is a flamboyant theatre director who struggles with dealing with everyday practicalities. Gomez's Mabel is a young woman with her whole life ahead of her who is nevertheless troubled by things that happened ten years earlier. Each character is both an observer of the murder mystery, with ideas on how to solve it, but also to some degree a participant; Mabel used to be friends with the victim, something she is reluctant to tell her new friends about; Putnam's long-term business associate agrees to bankroll their podcast but becomes a suspect; and one of Savage's new friends attracts the ire of the killer after helping the trio explore new ideas.

Each one of the ten episodes is structured like a podcast episode, complete with a dramatic voiceover explaining what's going on and what the stakes are. Typically each episode revolves around a new suspect and the trio find reasons to discount them or keep them under suspicion. This structure and each episode's brisk pacing (the episodes are only around 30 minutes long) makes for economical storytelling, without a wasted moment or filler.

The show also manages to balance a truly impressive cast. As well as the three superstar leads and Oscar-nominee Amy Ryan in a supporting role, the show features impressive turns from Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon (as himself), Jane Lynch, Nathan Lane, and, in a near-non-sequitur tangent which is nevertheless hilarious, Sting (as himself).

The show's success hinges on its old-fashioned comedy stylings, with occasional elements of farce and theatrical storytelling, melded with the way it employs modern technology, with consideration of the technical requirements needed to make a good podcast and the way character conversations often unfold through text messages. The show even feels confident enough to engage in some experimentation: the seventh episode, The Boy from 6B, unfolds almost completely without dialogue, in the vein of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Hush, except that Only Murders in the Building even more commits to the bit (the Buffy episode had dialogue at the start and end of the episode, but Only Murders only has a single audible word). The show ably mixes the old and the new to create something that feels consistently fresh.

A good murder mystery sets up the crime, explores the life of the victim and establishes a number of suspects who could be the killer. Feature films have to contend with limited time to do all of this before having to resolve the case, but a TV show has the luxury to breathe and spend a lot of time on set-up before revealing the solution, and wondering if the audience has gotten there ahead of them. Only Murders in the Building is a very good murder mystery, with some witty writing, smart plotting and outstanding performances, let down perhaps only by the cliffhanger ending leading into the (fortunately greenlit and shooting) second season.

The first season of Murders in the Building (*****) is available now on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ in the rest of the world.

Y: THE LAST MAN TV series dropped by FX

In a surprising move, FX has decided not to proceed with a second season of Y: The Last Man, its adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan's much-lauded comic book series. The decision is especially startling as it was taken when only seven of the ten episodes had aired in the United States, and six worldwide. Typically such decisions would only be taken or announced once the whole season was available, so as not to put people off watching the rest of the season.

Vaughan's Y: The Last Man comic book series, co-created and drawn by Pia Guerra, ran from 2002 to 2008 and was a marked early success in the post-apocalyptic comic genre (Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead debuted a year later). The comic posits a world where every single mammal with a Y chromosome (even sperm) has instantly dropped dead or become unviable, apart from two: the titular Yorick Brown and his pet monkey, Ampersand. The two find themselves at the mercy of the surviving female population, some of whom want to clone them, others who want to use their genetic material to create a cure, and a nihilistic cult which wants to kill him and end any hope of survival for the human race. The comic was applauded for its unpredictable story turns.

There were several attempts to bring the show to the screen before FX landed the rights in 2015. Development was repeatedly stymied by changes in personnel and disputes between the studio and various showrunners on the tone of the show. A pilot was filmed in 2018, which created a mixed reaction at the network. Eliza Clark finally landed the showrunner gig in 2019 and was able to steer the first season into production. However, the production period for the show then ran into problems and delays resulting from the COVID pandemic before finally concluding in July 2021, three years after shooting on the pilot began. The show began airing last month after a further change, a last-minute move from FX itself to American streaming service Hulu.

The show has received fairly mixed reviews, with a common consensus being that the opening episodes are too grim and humourless before the show is allowed to breathe in later episodes. Other criticisms include the writing for protagonist Yorick Brown, which makes him very unlikeable for large chunks of the season, and a scattergun narrative that careens between three storylines (Yorick on the move, his sister who has fallen in with a cult and his mother's precarious position as the President of the United States) with some severe pacing issues. Some critics also noted that the show's grimdark tone is not necessarily the best fit for the world in general right now, and that also some of the show's thunder and power has been stolen by several other post-apocalyptic shows, including The Walking Dead and its two spin-offs, as well as the recent mini-series version of The Stand. However, critical appreciation for the series has grown over the course of the season, with special praise reserved for Ashley Romans' powerful performance as Agent 355.

The actual reasons for the cancellation are unclear - FX has not commented so far - but it might be that the show's initial release has simply not delivered the required viewing figures on Hulu and, worldwide, Disney+. The delays have meant that the show is very expensive and it needed to be a massive hit right out of the gate.

For my part, the show started sluggishly but has picked up momentum over the course of the season and the story has become more interesting. Certainly the source material, if adapted well, has the potential to take the show on a wild ride which should avoid comparisons with other post-apocalyptic series.

Showrunner Eliza Clark has noted that they have the opportunity to take the project elsewhere, and it may be possible to save the show on another network or streaming service. The show has picked up a few high-profile fans, with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk revealing he's a fan on Twitter.

UPDATE: The Hollywood Reporter has the inside scoop on why the show was cancelled. There was a hard deadline of 15 October when FX had to decide to spend $3 million on renewing the cast contracts or not, and they decided they would not do that without a renewal decision. Since they did not have enough viewing figure data to make the call, they decided not to renew. It also sounds like FX may have become somewhat disillusioned with the project given its six-year gestation period and frequent changes of showrunner and actors.

However, FX are reportedly keen to help the show find a new home and it sounds like discussions are underway for Y: The Last Man to move to potentially HBO Max, which might be a better fit for it. This is unusual given that FX is part of the Disney family and the show could perhaps move somewhere else within its empire, but a sign of good faith that FX has in the production team. Given that the cast contracts have now been terminated and the cast could start getting other offers soon, such a transition would have to happen pretty quickly.

Brian K. Vaughan's Y: THE LAST MAN to hit screens on 13 September

After years in development hell, a protracted development process involving a pilot that had to be heavily reshot and then production delays due to a pandemic, Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man finally has a release date and trailer.

The series is set in a world where, in one single moment, every living mammal on the planet with a Y chromosome drops dead, including sperm and embryos. With, to all intents and purposes, every man on the planet dead, the remainder of humanity grapples with the prospect of extinction and also the sheer difficulty in keeping everything running when ever other member of the species has expired. As chaos spreads and civilisation threatens to unravel, it is revealed that two Y-bearing mammals have survived...and are now the #1 target for every government, scientist and nutcase in the world.

The original comic series ran for sixty issues between 2002 and 2008. It made Vaughan's name, paving the way for his later work on the TV show Lost and later comic series including Paper Girls and the massively successful Saga.

The TV version is executive produced by Eliza Clark and stars Diane Lane as President Jennifer Brown, Ben Schnetzer as Yorick Brown, Ashley Romans as Agent 355, Diana Bang as Dr. Allison Mann, Olivia Thirlby as Hero Brown, Juliana Canfield as Beth DeVille and Marin Ireland as Nora Brady.

Y: The Last Man will debut on 13 September on FX on Hulu. International broadcast partners have not been revealed, though due to a deal with the BBC in the UK, it is likely to air on the BBC and iPlayer streaming service there.

Hulu developing new HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY TV series

The American Hulu streaming service is planning a fresh adaptation of Douglas Adams' science fiction comedy franchise, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Originating as a radio series in 1978, the story has been adapted as five novels, a BBC TV mini-series in 1981 (recently reissued on Blu-Ray), several video games and a 2005 Hollywood movie which was, to put it mildly, not great.

The new project is being spearheaded by producer Carlton Cuse (Lost) and writer Jason Fuchs (Wonder Woman). It is unclear which of the several different competing versions of the story they will be adapting, although the smart money is on the novels, which took the story further than any of the other mediums.

The BBC mini-series only adapted the first two books, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), so a fresh TV version could take the story further by adapting Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long and Thanks For All the Fish (1984) and Mostly Harmless (1992).

BBC America recently used Adams' other major genre work, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, as the inspiration for a two-season TV show that was well received but not successful in the ratings game.

Disney take over Hulu streaming service

Disney have taken control of Hulu, a popular American streaming service which competes with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video in the States.

It's been speculated for some time that this was Disney's plan. Disney are launching their own streaming service, Disney+, in November this year but have been clear that the channel will only be for children and "family" programming. This left questions over Disney's ability or willingness to create material for an adult audience. It also raised questions about Disney's vast new store of films and TV shows from 20th Century Fox, which they recently completed acquiring, as many of these would be unsuitable for a family audience.

Disney's acquisition of Hulu now ends that speculation. Hulu already produce adult programming, such as the critically-acclaimed Handmaid's Tale (which is preparing to release its third season), and in fact have several more adult-oriented Marvel TV shows in development, including Ghost Rider. It is assumed that, as licences expire elsewhere, Disney will move all of Fox's adult-oriented shows over to Hulu and the younger children's shows to Disney+ (they have already confirmed that Disney+ will be the new home of The Simpsons, although presumably the likes of Family Guy would have to go on Hulu).

A key weakness of the Hulu purchase is the lack of international exposure. Hulu licences its shows to overseas partners, with Channel 4 showing The Handmaid's Tale in the UK, for example. As part of the purchase, Disney will begin expanding Hulu's overseas footprint, possibly as part of a pairing deal with Disney+ when it launches in overseas markets.

Hulu option WILD CARDS for television, put two series into active development

Streaming service Hulu have optioned the rights to George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards superhero universe and are developing two potential TV series based on the setting.

Martin created the Wild Cards setting in the early 1980s, using the roleplaying game Superworld to develop the world and premise. Martin and his initial group of players, many of whom were drawn from his local Santa Fe and Albuquerque writers' groups, created the basic setting and many of the characters were their player-characters from the game. Following the failure of his 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag, Martin moved away from novel writing to focus on a burgeoning Hollywood scripting career but hit on the idea of turning the roleplaying game into a series of short stories and anthologies, a "shared world" as it was then termed.

The first book in the series, Wild Cards, was released in 1987 and promptly sold over 100,000 copies, making it a wild success. Martin and co-editor Melinda Snodgrass (Star Trek: The Next Generation) continued working on the series, bringing in new writers and soliciting new stories from older ones, throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Martin credits the series and its high sales with keeping his name in the eye of publishers, restoring his commercial reputation after The Armageddon Rag and helped pave the way for the publication of A Game of Thrones in 1996. There was a brief pause in the series in the late 1990s and another in the early 2000s as various publishers cycled through the series (which started with Bantam and moved to Baen and then iBooks). Tor Books picked up the series in 2008 with Inside Straight, the first in a "new generation" of books, and more have followed. As of November 2018, 27 books have been published in the series to date with sales in the low millions.

The premise of the series is that, in an alternative 1946, an alien virus is released over New York City. 90% of these infected by the virus die instantly ("Drawing the Black Queen"). 9% are transformed into deformed freaks ("Jokers"). 1% gain amazing superpowers ("Aces"). Smaller outbreaks spread the virus all over the globe. The bulk of the series takes place contemporary to publication date and explores the ramifications of a world where both superpowers and alien races are known to exist.

SyFy (who are launching their own GRRM adaptation, Nightflyers, next month) optioned the series almost a decade ago. Their parent company Universal re-optioned the rights with a view to both film and TV applications, and have now placed the project with Universal Cable Productions and Hulu. Andrew Miller (The Secret Circle) is to act as showrunner and executive producer, with Snodgrass and Martin to act as executive producers.

Martin has an exclusivity deal with HBO, which will be airing the final season of Game of Thrones in April 2019, so his role on the Wild Cards series will be hands-off, with Snodgrass expected to take more of an active oversight role.

The Handmaid's Tale: Season 1

The day after tomorrow. In the wake of damaging climate change and rapidly growing infertility, the United States has fallen, torn apart by civil and societal strife. In its stead has risen Gilead, a religious theocracy based on an ultra-conservative interpretation of the Holy Bible. Women have been relegated to the status of secondary citizens, unable to vote, not even being taught how to read. For women of proven fertility it's even worse: they become "handmaids", given to rich couples to bear children where the wife cannot. A woman once named June is now Offred, a handmaid in the family of the Waterford family. Her life is filled with despair, until she learns how to play the game in this new world and learns that there may be a way of escaping her fate.

The Handmaid's Tale is the most famous novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, an Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner feted for its language, its characters and the grim but compelling dystopian world it paints. The previous attempt to adapt the novel, a 1990 movie with a script by Harold Pinter, had a mixed reception, with one of the problems being that it was very difficult to pack the levels of character and themes in the book into an hour-and-a-half.

Hulu has now adapted the novel as an ongoing television series, starring Elisabeth Moss as the titular handmaid, June (or Offred). With ten hours to fill, the first season immediately lets the story breathe, using its running time to intelligently examine different facets of the world Atwood created back in 1985. The "worldbuilding" of Gilead in the TV series is significantly more robust and detailed, with the series alluding to an ongoing war against remnants of the old American government and expanding on Gilead's relationship with both Canada and Mexico. This expansion of detail is not allowed to overwhelm the characters or the central story, but it adds background and depth to the setting.

The Handmaid's Tale is never an easy watch. It depicts a world in which women are systematically broken down and reduced to servitors, walking wombs for the use of their owners, their own feelings and thoughts marginalised or ignored. They are meant to breed, to have their babies taken way from them, and then used again. Abuse in the system is rife, some of it to the benefit of the handmaids, and as the story unfolds Offred learns how to game the system to her own eventual goal, of escaping to Canada and hopefully find her daughter along the way. The core of the story is triumph - or at least survival - against adversity, one of the oldest narratives, but to get there takes a lot of adversity, and with a multi-season run planned, we'll likely see a lot more adversity to come.

Fortunately, the Handmaid's Tale seems aware it could become an unrelenting parade of grimdark and takes steps to avert there. Flashbacks to the days before the fascist takeover show happier times and we get to see the characters (on all sides of the fence) as they were when they were younger, before the walls (on speech and thought, as well as literally) came slamming down. Unlike the novel, which remains tightly focused on Offred, the TV show develops side-stories which follow characters like Serena Joy (Commander Waterford's formerly famous wife now struggling to cope as a second-class citizen, angrily jealous of Offred's fertility) and Nick, the Waterfords' driver who has his own hidden agenda. The series moves easily between these storylines whilst retaining the core focus on Offred, our narrator and our window into this world.

Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men) is terrific as Offred, striking a balance between resolve, intelligence, steel and apparent submission. Joseph Fiennes - a talented actor who arguably has never quite fulfilled the early promise of Shakespeare in Love - is also very good as Waterford, a man who has brought about a world of apparent religious respect for God but who is happy to hypocritically indulge in vices (showing his concern is less religion than it is for the control and submission of women). Arguably the most outstanding revelation of the season is Yvonne Strahovski, whose previous starring role in Chuck hinted at much greater acting potential which is given full flourish here: Serena Joy is harsh, cold and distant but we then get to see behind the facade and discover that she was once a more sympathetic character...until the season finale when we find out just what she is really capable of. Alexis Bledel (Gilmore Girls) also gives an outstanding performance in a small role as Emily, another handmaid forcibly separated from her wife and keen to find a way of bringing Gilead down (Bledel has been promoted to a regular in Season 2, where this story will presumably become more important). Ann Dowd also gives a striking performance as Aunt Lydia, the handmaids' supposed mentor who is brutal towards them when they are defiant, but occasionally shows hints that she is not keen on the system either (and takes advantage of a few moments when she can force the new order to listen to her). A key strength of the cast is how well they make the antagonistic characters work.

The show doesn't have many weak links. Some questions remain on how completely and quickly Gilead rose to power (apparently only two or three years have passed since they overthrew the United States) and occasionally it feels like the pacing flags, or potentially interesting stories are put on ice for several episodes and then abruptly brought back into focus. It's also worth mentioning again that this can be a hard watch, and definitely not a show to put on if you're feeling depressed. But for those who appreciate great acting, excellent writing and some remarkable direction, it's unmissable.

Season 1 of The Handmaid's Tale (****½) is powerful, evocative and haunting television. It can be watched on Amazon in both the UK and USA, and is also available on DVD (but, curiously given its visual richness, not on Blu-Ray) in the United States. Season 2 is expected to air in April 2018.