Joss Whedon To Exec Produce Comedy ‘Pippa Smith: Grown-Up Detective’ & A Witch Fantasy Drama For Freeform
After playing around with Marvel and DC, Joss Whedon is heading back to TV again to exec produce two new female-led shows for Freeform it has been announced.
‘Pippa Smith: Grown-Up Detective’ comes from British-American comedian and writer Siobhan Thompson (‘CollegeHumor’) and American comedian and writer Rebecca Drysdale (‘Key & Peele’). According to Variety, the series is a dark comedy that follows Pippa Smith, a twenty-something former kid sleuth, as she deals with relationships, addiction and being too dang old for the detecting game. Each episode, Pippa solves a new case, while unravelling a bigger mystery and attempting to navigate a messy personal life.
The fantasy drama (previously known as ‘Motherland’, now the ‘Untitled Eliot Laurence Project’) comes from Eliot Laurence (‘Claws’), and is set in an alternate America where witches ended their persecution 300 years ago by cutting a deal with the U.S. government to fight for their country. The series follows three young women from basic training in combat magic into early deployment at Fort Salem. In this world, the traditional roles of gender and power are flipped with the more dominant women on the front lines fighting looming terrorist threats that are familiar to our world, but with tactics and weapons supernatural.
‘We had been looking for a show about witches,” commented Karey Burke, Freeform’s Executive VP, Programming and Development during an event in NYC. She goes on to say that the alternative timeline, in the vein of ‘Man in the High Castle’ and ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, and the use of magic over guns and bullets was a major selling point of the project, adding “We really like the story possibilities that gives us.”
‘Pippa Smith: Grown-Up Detective’ is currently described as “in development”, whilst the Eliot Laurence’s witchy fantasy drama has been given a pilot order. It’s entirely possible neither of them makes it further than that, but we’ll let you know when we hear more.
