Because you can’t play Ink Master reruns forever, Spike TV, the Axe Body Spray to Esquire TV’s Chanel Bleu, has started producing original dramas. Over the summer it announced two historical dramas featuring manly men slaughtering infidels and ruling Egypt, and now it is venturing into another realm where there are no girls allowed: the Deep Web.
The Deep Web, for those who don’t know (and why would you, since CSI: Cyber hasn’t started yet) is a term for the areas of cyberspace unreachable by conventional means, meaning it can’t be Googled. (Or Binged, for that matter.) One of the Deep Web’s most infamous outposts is Silk Road, an online marketplace for everything from drugs to human kidneys (but mostly drugs) that was brought to the public’s attention by a Time article about it in 2013. That article served as the inspiration for Spike TV’s series Deep Web, which will follow a Silicon Valley entrepreneur’s presumably Walter White-esque rise to power as the kingpin of an online empire that sells illegal items (such as, for example, drugs) to the Internet’s criminal underground.
Deep Web is being written and executive produced by relative newcomer Scott Gold, who at the moment only has a couple of Under The Dome writing credits to his name. The rest of the creative team, however, is more experienced—namely 24 and Dracula producer Tony Krantz, along with Gary Oldman and Douglas Urbanski’s Flying Studio Pictures. Flying Studio Pictures has mainly concentrated on features in the past, but Urbanski tells Deadline the move is part of a “long term strategy of spreading our creative wings into other platforms.” Oldman’s interest in the Deep Web, presumably, stems from the fact that it’s the only place he can express his more controversial opinions without fear of censure. That, and the Fox Nation comments section.