Peacock lands Seth MacFarlane's live-action Dungeon Crawler Carl show

The MacFarlane connection makes more sense than you might initially think: Between The Orville and Ted, Fuzzy Door has gotten pretty good in recent years at making CGI-heavy TV on the (relative) cheap. And it’ll certainly need it for DCC, which has, as one of its two main characters, a snooty talking cat who can fire Magic Missiles from her eyes. (The other is a former Coast Guard member who runs around barefoot in boxer shorts because the computer controlling the dungeon he’s trapped in has a foot fetish. Don’t look at us, Dinniman wrote it.) Although announced to be in development back in 2024, it hadn’t been clear until today whether the series was going to be live-action or animation; all involved—which also includes Marvel and live-action Cowboy Bebop writer Christopher Yost, who’s writing the show—have apparently settled on the more expensive, if also more ambitious, option.

Dinniman has published seven doorstopper-sized tomes in the series, which takes place on a version of Earth where most of the planet’s population gets smooshed by aliens, with the survivors tossed into a dungeon to serve as contestants in a galactic reality show. (There’s also some pretty aggressive capitalist critique mixed in there, as the titular Carl becomes increasingly driven to burn the whole corrupt system to the ground.) The series’ eighth book, A Parade Of Horribles, is due out on May 12.