Peacock is now officially in the “live-action TV adaptation of a book series about a man and his talking cat who are kind of trapped in a video game, and also there’s a surprising amount of Foot Stuff” business, as Deadline reports that the NBC-adjacent streamer has just given a straight-to-series order to Seth MacFarlane’s Dungeon Crawler Carl adaptation.
As we reported a couple of months back, the series (based on Matt Dinniman’s ridiculously successful “LitRPG” phenomenon) is being showrun by Chris Yost, the live-action Cowboy Bebop adaptor whose other recent credits include Thor: Ragnarok, The Mandalorian, and this year’s Star Wars: Maul. The series is being run through MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door Productions, which used to just be the studio that made Family Guy and American Dad!, but which has, thanks to shows like The Orville and Ted, picked up a reputation in recent years for handling CGI-heavy live-action genre shows without just completely obliterating their own budgets.
Which is going to be pretty important for DCC, which gets pretty fantastical, violent, and grotesque, pretty quickly. As we noted above, the series—which currently extends to eight doorstopper-sized novels, including a recent installment, A Parade Of Horribles (which, we’d argue at the risk of blatant self-indulgent digression, meandered too damn much with the Wacky Races stuff before buckling down for a pretty good ending)—centers on an everyman hero who’s forced to enter a video game-esque dungeon after aliens flatten every structure on Earth, accompanied by his now-sentient former show cat. What follows is a blend of about a dozen different tones of comedy mixed with some actually pretty compelling adventure material, plus an occasional dose of satire, which has made Dinniman’s work a fixture in bookstores across the planet ever since his series broke online containment a few years back.
The author himself announced news of the series order on social media, posting a promotional image that declared, “Surprise, bitches! It’s official.” Dinniman did not reveal things like casting, timing, or how much of the story we might see a season of the series cover—although he did note that he and Yost would be appearing at a Dungeon Crawler Carl panel at San Diego Comic-Con next month, where it’s possible some details might slip.
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