As far as TV adaptations of well-loved modern comics go, we’d kind of assumed it’d be a while before Hollywood really got serious about Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s Sex Criminals, what with its premise relying on the Standards And Practices-terrorizing question “What if time stopped every time you had an orgasm?” But here we are, with Deadline confirming the news: Imogen Poots and John Reynolds are your new Sex Criminals, courtesy of Prime Video.
Admittedly, Hollywood has been flirting with the idea of taking the series—in which young singles Suzie and Jon hook up, realize they both have the power to stop time when they climax, and then take the obvious next step of using this ability to rob banks—into the TV realm for nearly a decade at this point, although no further movement was detected until this January. That was when it was revealed that husband-wife team Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon were developing the show, with Nanjiani in a starring role; it’s now been revealed that that doesn’t mean he’ll be playing male lead Jon, but will still co-star in the series. (Also being developed with filmmaker and occasional comics guy Tze Chun.)
We’ll note, in passing, that Poots and Reynolds both feel like extremely spot-on casting: The Chronology Of Water star has an energy that matches Suzie’s wry, mischievous take on both sex in general and her powers specifically, while Reynolds is simply a dead-on physical match for the bookish, somewhat awkward Jon. (He also seems like the kind of guy who doesn’t mind standing around with a glowing penis, which is just one of the first ways Fraction and Zdarsky’s comic makes “time stops when you fuck” even weirder than it might initially seem.)
Sex Criminals is set to run for eight episodes on Prime Video. The original comic series went for 31 issues between 2013 and 2020.
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