Sci Fi TV Development: An Evil Dead TV Series with Bruce Campbell, Man in the High Castle Pilot Announcement, Lemony Snicket on Netflix, and More

The development announcements for sci fi / fantasy shows has slowed down a bit with only five that I have seen in the was couple of weeks plus one update.  But there’s a few big announcements below, especially the first one.

Ash vs. Evil Dead:  The Evil Dead franchise just won’t die and perhaps that’s a good thing.  It received a big screen reboot last year which did quite well at the Box Office, and now it is headed to the small screen with its star from the original trilogy.  Starz has given a greenlight for ten episodes of the series which will be produced by creators Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert and will bring back fan favorite Bruce Campbell as Ash.  The show will pickup with the character thirty years later and, according to the Comic Book Resources site, ” when a new Deadite plague is set to destroy humanity, Ash needs to get back into gear to take down the undead menace and vanquish his personal demons”.  With Raimi, Taper, and Campbell all back together, this one will definitely be a must-see affair!

The Man in the High Castle:  This previously announced project which will adapt the Phillip K. Dick alternate history tale where the Allied Powers lost World War II is on the schedule for Amazon Instant Video’s first 2015 pilot season.  Ridley Scott and Frank Spotnitz will executive produce the pilot and viewers will get a chance to vote on whether they want it to continue as a series.  And based on the show’s source material and pedigree helming it, there is a good chance that will happen.

A Series of Unfortunate Events:  Another announcement from one of the streaming services, Netflix is working on an adaptation of the popular series of books by Daniel Handler.  There is very little additional information at the moment, and it would likely be late 2015 or early 2016 before the series will be available for viewing.

League of Pan: FOX has given a script commitment to this modern day revisiting of the Peter Pan story.  Sounding very similar to ABC’s popular fairy tale updating Once Upon A Time, Deadline Hollywood describes the project as

A grounded, edgy, soapy thriller featuring updated versions of all favorite Neverland characters. It picks up the Lost Boys fifteen years after they left Neverland. Now men and very much estranged, the Lost Boys are forced back together when they realize someone is killing them off one by one. To find out who and why and stay alive, they’ll have to get past the bitter rivalries and bad blood that forced them out of paradise and rediscover the magic that made them fearless. This time in the very real world of contemporary Los Angeles.

This would likely be targeted the for the 2015-16 season.

Damn! Glenn Gordon Caron has been given the greenlight to develop this series that “centers on a reprobate conman who meets his untimely death but gets another chance at life as an angel”.  He previously created another show about a man who gets a second chance at life in 1999, the cult favorite Now and Again.  Other shows that he created include 1985’s Moonlighting and 2005’s Medium.

Evil Men:  USA has ordered this supernatural series which will star Clifton Collins Jr. (Pacific Rim) and Dallas Roberts (The Walking Dead).  The Wrap gives the following description of the show:

Evil Men follows an upstanding, middle-class family man Harry Killas (Roberts), whose life is turned upside down when he is approached by a frighteningly powerful entity and commanded to kill “evil men” or see his family — along with his city — utterly destroyed. However, the gleeful psycho who is meant to be his first target, instead begins teaching him how to carry out his new destiny.

The show will likely be targeted for late 2015 or early 2016 bow.