Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
Last November, we reported on news that was mostly surprising in so far as we honestly didn’t think it’d take this long: Video game franchise Mass Effect was getting a TV show, at the hands of Amazon’s Prime Video. Although its reputation has been a bit tarnished by soft reboot Mass Effect: Andromeda, the original Mass Effect trilogy remains a landmark in sci-fi storytelling amongst people who also maybe want to have video game sex with as many of their co-workers as possible, proving that studio BioWare (Dragon Age) could handle science fiction just as well as fantasy. Its character-focused stories and quippy dialogue, especially, feel like a natural fit for TV, especially as the video-game-to-film-and-TV boom kicked off in earnest after Super Mario Bros. made too much money.
Things have been quiet from the show ever since the initial announcement, though, until this week, when Amazon MGM Studios announced that it’d hired a showrunner to bring the series to the screen: Doug Jung. Jung does have a sci-fi background: He co-wrote 2016’s Star Trek: Beyond and 2018’s The Cloverfield Paradox, both of which, probably coincidentally, currently serve as the the tombstones for their respective franchises. In terms of TV shows, he’s written for Big Love, Banshee, and Mindhunter; he also served as showrunner on Jason Momoa’s upcoming Apple TV+ historical drama Chief Of War.
Jung has a big task ahead of him in terms of capturing the expansive weirdness of the Mass Effect universe, in which humanity is a junior partner in a galactic alliance of largely bone-able aliens. The series takes as its primary concerns the battle between pragmatism and altruism, the possibly inevitable conflicts between synthetic and organic intelligences, and enduring, unsolvable questions, like “Who in god’s name would ever date Ashley in the first game when Liara is right there?” Variety notes that the previously announced Daniel Casey, also an executive producer, will still write the series, with Jung handling the showrunning part of the job. No word on when the series might see the light of day.
