Marvel TV’s Jeph Loeb On Fox’s “Reimagined” ‘Hellfire Club’ Series, ‘Cloak And Dagger’, And More [TCA 2016]
By Fred Topel/Aug. 8, 2016 9:30 am EST
Marvel’s Most Wanted was designed to be a spin-off of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on ABC. Since ABC passed, would Loeb shop it around to other networks? “I never say never, but we designed that show to do a very specific thing,” Loeb said. “The network decided that that thing was not something that they wanted to do. I love everybody that’s involved with it. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing and execution and performances, but for whatever reason it didn’t work for the network. I can’t comment on what they do.”
On Thursday, ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey told reporters that she is still having development conversations with Marvel television for other potential series. It seems there are no hard feelings at Marvel.
“There’s also just a real practical element of being on a network which at the end of the day has 18 hours of programming,” Loeb said. “It’s a real estate issue at the end of the day. X number of those hours are half hours and X number of those are reality programs and X number of those are news programs. The real question is how many one-hour dramas can there actually be on ABC. I think one of the things that’s very exciting about what Channing Dungey is talking about is how do we change that model? What’s the best way for us to do it? We’re seeing it more and more. We’re seeing shows that are eight episodes, that are ten episodes. We broke a mold just with what we did with S.H.I.E.L.D. and [Agent] Carter in the sense that we stopped S.H.I.E.L.D., we ran Carter and we restarted S.H.I.E.L.D. again.”
Marvel is launching their first series on Freeform, ABC’s young adult cable network. He explained why Cloak and Dagger was a natural fit for Freeform. “It’s a love story that happens to have characters that have always traditionally been in that age group,” Loeb said. “It’s not like we took something and made it into a YA. It speaks to a YA audience and is a YA property. Would I do Punisher on Freeform? I don’t think that’s going to connect the same way.”
