The Powers TV adaptation is blessed by some higher power. Having already shot one pilot based on Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Oeming’s creator-owned series about police in a world filled with super-heroes that was passed on by the network, it seemed that getting budget to rework and reshoot that pilot was the show’s last chance, and one that also didn’t seem to hit the right notes with FX executives. But the show, it seems, isn’t dead yet. Here’s FX president John Landgraf:

After we made the pilot, we actually developed three more [episode] scripts. So then we had a pilot plus three scripts, and we decided between the pilot and the scripts that it wasn’t quite the series that we needed it to be. When I say we, by the way, Brian Bendis is involved in every phase of this conversation and discussion. But one of the scripts was written by this guy named Charlie Huston, and he was a novelist. Both I and Brian and others thought, “Wow, there is actually something in the tone of this.” So Charlie was approached, I think by Brian, and said, “Look, would you be interested in taking on Powers?” And Charlie said, “Well, I’ve never actually adapted anything before in my life. I have only written novels and stuff of my own, but Powers is my favorite graphic novel, and yes!”So what ended up happening was we reconstituted the whole thing around Charlie as the creator, with Brian. Charlie went up to Seattle, and they sat down and they talked, and read through all the books, and they came back with a new vision, basically. Essentially, a new pilot to begin with, which is a new, different story than the pilot that we shot. So that pilot is officially gone and dead, and the actors are all gone, but we’re developing a whole new pilot from scratch.

If this seems like an excruciatingly long process full of false starts to you, imagine what it feels like to Bendis and Oeming. At this point, I almost feel as if FX should just agree to put Powers on the air in the Huston-led incarnation just to make it up to all of the fans. This has been going on for almost four years already…!

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