Amazon is working on a Mass Effect TV show, based on long-running series of sci-fi role-playing video games from Bioware. Deadline reports that they've hired a showrunner: Doug Jung, who's worked on shows like Mindhunter, Banshee and Big Love as well as Jason Momoa's upcoming historical drama Chief of War. He also co-wrote the script for the movie Star Trek Beyond.
Jung will work alongside Dan Casey, who's been writing on the show for nearly a year. There have been four Mass Effects games released so far: the original trilogy and a fourth called Mass Effect: Andromeda. There's a fifth in development, so Amazon will have plenty of source material to draw from, enough to make me nervous.
The most obvious route is to adapt the original trilogy, which follows Commander Shepard as he or she (you get to choose in the games) travels the galaxy with a group of companions, investigating strange events, romancing aliens and uncovering secrets behind a hostile machine race known as the Reapers. It's a big, sprawling story that would take multiple seasons to tell to completion...which is a bit daunting given that Amazon just cancelled The Wheel of Time, its adaptation of Robert Jordan's 14-book-strong epic fantasy series smack dab in the middle of the story, cutting it off mid-stream. If I were working on a Mass Effect show, I would worry that it might get the same treatment sooner or later.
Of course, that (probably) won't happen if the Mass Effect show pulls in great numbers. And Amazon does already have a hit in Fallout, another popular video game series it's turned into a TV series. I feel like I'm watching Amazon's interests change in front of my eyes. At one point, they were going all in on epic fantasy, making The Wheel of Time and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power at the same time. Now The Wheel of Time is out, The Rings of Power hasn't made the splash they hoped it would, and they're pivoting to video game adaptations.
Hollywood has always run on trends, and a younger player like Amazon Studios would be especially vulnerable to them, so I'm not surprised by this turn of events, just pointing it out. There's no release date yet set for Mass Effect, but it feels like it's in the early going, so I wouldn't expect to see anything before 2027.
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