It seems that the Teen Titans' leggy, psionic-powered half-demon Raven will be the next DC Comic property to grace the small screen. According to the report from Variety over the weekend, the CW, set at the end of this season to send-off its longtime superhero drama Smallville, will look to adapt the powerful demoniac temptress as its genre-similar replacement. Set to serve as Writer and Executive Producer, is Diego Gutierrez, who will be bringing loads of experience from his time as Co-Exec Producer on ABC's revival of V, as well as serving in various capacities on Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. While the CW network has recently reinvented itself to focus on 'teen' type shows like Gossip Girl, it's also managed to maintain shows with a bit of an edge like Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries, as well as this season's new show Nikita. While Raven may seem like an odd DC property to use, taking the network's lineup of shows consisting of teen drama, monsters, and femme fatale's into consideration, it's actually a perfect fit. The question is, how will they approach her story?
Raven was the daughter of DC's notorious outer-dimensional demon Trigon, who mated with a human female to produce an offspring for the purpose of being his living portal to our dimension. So...yeah, it will definitely be interesting to see how they handle not only Raven's story, but exactly what she's going to do in each episode. (Assuming that the Teen Titans will not be a part of the storyline.) However, even if the show follows a standalone canon, the idea of Raven's constant struggle with the overwhelming powers from her demon half, and perhaps an ongoing quest to foil Trigon's arrival on Earth, just might be enough to serve as workable plot. Regardless, on paper, it seems to have present all the tools that make a show that would be on the CW in the post-Twilight era of drama surrounding the 'tortured, but beautiful.'
With David E. Kelly shopping his Wonder Woman project for a network, loose rumors of a Batman TV series possibly set to hit sometime after the last Christopher Nolan Bat-film in 2012's The Dark Knight Rises, and a boat-load of Marvel TV projects on the horizon, Raven would be joining a growing group of comic heroes set to enjoy the spotlight on TV. Likely, the CW is going to inject it with its brand of superficial, self-pitying teen issues and plenty of gratuitous slow-motion bod shots. However, the same could have been said on paper many years ago about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and, of course, Joss Whedon managed to turn a questionable TV adaptation of a movie comedy into one of the most compelling and beloved TV universes ever. So, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Raven just yet.
What do you think about CW's selection of Raven as its new comic book TV property? Is it overreaching? Or out-of-the-box thinking?
