This story on Simon Oliver and Tony Moore’s Vertigo series EXTERMINATORS getting picked up by Showtime for possible TV development, by DEXTER’s Sara Colleton, is ironic because Oliver had originally developed the tale of a colorful team of bug-fighters as a TV pitch.
The deal with Showtime marks a full circle for “Exterminators,” which has been described as “Six Feet Under” in the world of pest control. The project, now in development at the pay cable network, is said to have been originally conceived by writer Oliver as a TV pitch.
In its Showtime incarnation, “Exterminators” will revolve around the Bug-Be-Gone crew, an extended dysfunctional family of exterminators whose greatest enemies aren’t the insects and rodents they meet and kill on a daily basis but rather their own self doubts, vices and inner demons.
This brings up yet again the entire foofaraw over “What is mainstream?” Was the EXTERMINATORS, which currently sells in the neighborhood of 6-7k, ever truly mainstream? Would comics shop retailers consider it MORE mainstream if it was a Showtime TV show? Would a licensed comic have sold more copies or less, if it was published by, say, BOOM! or someone else? Or even Vertigo?
Somehow I’ve missed this series, but now feel like I have to pick it up immediately.
I was going to say that the really ironic thing is that the comic has already been canceled, hasn’t it? I’d highly recommend it, anyway: one of my favorite of the recent Vertigo crop.
Mainstream-ness is a question of degree, and usually an invitation to intolerably dull semantic arguments. But the broad answer is: EXTERMINATORS hasn’t yet achieved mainstream success, although there’s always the possibility that it might in future. I have my doubts that the Showtime audience would be interested in comic book adaptations; if it’s a close adaptatin, they might be interested in the source material, though.
Last issue of Exterminators comes out week of the 23rd I believe.
Hopefully, a tv series would help the comic book end of biz, cause honestly, I dropped this a while ago, as it was becoming boring and repetitive.
So Showtime beats HBO what it wants to set out to do, which is to make a adaptation of a Vertigo series. I wonder if the scheduling of Tru Blood has pushed the production back on Preacher because of vampires?
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Coat