Here’s one for all of the religious groups and easily angered parents on Facebook to start writing letters about: Fox has picked up the pilot for a show about the Devil. Like, the literal Devil. Satan himself. Plus, he almost certainly won’t be depicted as the traditional horned red guy with cloven hooves, either. That’s because this won’t be a show about just any Satan, this is a show about Lucifer Morningstar, the blonde-haired gentleman Satan introduced in DC Comics’ Sandman series. That makes this the perfect combination of TV’s love of antiheroes and its reliance on comic book adaptations, since it will have the unprecedented ability to annoy both fanboys and concerned parents in a single bound.
This news comes from Deadline, which says the Lucifer pilot is being developed by Tom Kapinos, the creator of Californication. The plot will reportedly focus on Lucifer as he gets tired of being President Of Hell—a job that involves signing endless pages of soul-related paperwork, devising increasingly cruel and ironic methods of torture, and having to take part in countless fiddle contests—so he moves to Los Angeles and opens a piano bar, as demons are wont to do. Given this relatively grounded premise, it seems like it would be fairly easy for Lucifer to do some kind of crossover with NBC’s Constantine, but a magic British guy and the Devil would probably work together long before Fox and NBC would, so the chances of that happening are pretty small. Anyway, with shows about Supergirl and The Teen Titans reportedly in the works as well, DC doesn’t appear interested in slowing down its TV output anytime soon. All it needs to do now is come up with some kind of competition-style reality show that is somehow based on a comic book and it can really start taking over.