The CW won’t announce its fall 2016 schedule until May, but we’re already getting an advance look at what new shows may be joining the network. And if the early pilot orders are any indication, The CW is hedging its bets with several genre series.
Over the weekend, The CW revealed that six drama projects have advanced to the pilot stage, including Riverdale, the “subversive” take on the classic Archie Comics characters that stalled out at Fox. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa — who writes the popular zombie apocalypse comic book, Afterlife with Archie — created Riverdale, which will feature a more contemporary take the Archies… but probably not as you remember them. For example, Archie’s a jock, Betty’s an Adderall addict, and Jughead’s going emo. Yeah… good luck with that.
Also on tap for a pilot episode is a gender-swapped version of the Frequency movie that came out in 2000. The leading character will now be a female detective in the year 2016 who uses her ham radio to talk to her father (who is also a detective) in 1996, to help solve a murder case that spans decades. Supernatural showrunner Jeremy Carver is the man tasked with making an ongoing story out of the film’s self-contained narrative.
Related: Archie May Be Coming Back To TV on Fox
Former Robot Chicken toy-wrangler and comic book writer Hugh Sterbakov is the showrunner and executive producer of The CW’s Transylvania series, which will be a period story that forces a young woman and a disgraced British detective to face the most famous monsters from literary history. Given the name of the show, Dracula will probably be one of the main villains.
Two of the genre pilots don’t even have names yet. Doris Egan (House) has an “untitled Mars project” that updates the Roanoke legend as a second group of colonists arrive on Mars and discover that the first colony has disappeared without a trace. The “untitled paranormal project” is from The Vampire Diaries creator Kevin Williamson. All that’s known about that pilot is that “a young woman seeks help from a parapsychologist when she begins to experience paranormal phenomena.”
The final drama pilot on The CW’s docket is the only one that isn’t a genre show. It’s called No Tomorrow, and it follows a newly formed couple as they attempt to check off their bucket lists together because the man believes that the apocalypse is coming soon. Jane the Virgin veterans Corinne Brinkerhoff and Ben Silverman are producing No Tomorrow.
Which of the six CW pilots are you most interested in? Let us know in the comment section below!
