NBC Re-Convenes for a ‘Midnight, Mass’

Looks like the Mulder, Scully and the Ghostbusters are about to get some company.

The Hollywood news blog Deadline is reporting that NBC has acquired the rights to do a television show based off the 2002 Vertigo comic series Midnight,  Mass. by writer John Rozum and artist Jesus Saiz. The comic series focused in on the exploits of a husband-and-wife supernatural investigators living in the New England hamlet of Midnight, Massachusetts. Although the series prompted a sequel miniseries in 2004, DC has sadly never collected either of the series. For this attempted TV translation, NBC has tapped movie screenwriter Evan Daughterty (Snow White & The Huntsman) to write the initial pilot and series overview.

Eagle-eyed comics fans might rub their eyes and think they’re getting deja vu for reading this news, and they’d be right. Midnight, Mass. has been optioned numerous times for development as television shows and motion pictures. Back in 2009, The Hollywood Reporter called it one of Vertigo’s most pursued properties. Back in 2009, NBC — the same network that is re-optioning it now in 2012 — attempted to get Midnight, Mass. off the ground as a series with screenwriter duo Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts (Pushing Daisies, Wonderfalls, Roswell). That 2009 attempt never got past the script stage, so even the most pessimist comics fan hopes this new attempt gets more traction that that.

An interesting side note to this is that back in March 2011, series creator John Rozum told us that Midnight, Mass. was originally intended to be a spin-off of the DC/Milestone series Xombi but he refashioned it as a standalone, creator-owned concept.

Comments

  1. What a stranger world Showbiz is. I enjoyed the series when it came out, but I’d never think of it as t.v. material.

  2. Maybe we’ll get a collected edition of the comics, at least!

  3. The weird thing is, I remember reading the first mini-series and enjoying it when I read it, but I can’t really remember a thing about it. Although I would love to read it again if it was collected.

  4. I love Xombi so I’m down for this….although I gotta find out where to find back issues of this cause I’ve never heard of it till now.