Krypton
While working on Man of Steel, I had a surfeit of backstory material that never made it into the finished film. After toying with the ideas for a few weeks, I pitched a concept for a Superman prequel series to WB television. A kind of Romeo and Juliet in space, with a little bit of Brave New World thrown in for good measure. Oddly enough, I was also revisiting material that I had explored back when I was co-plotting James Robinson’s Starman comic series. (We’d done a story in which Jack Knight traveled back in time and visited Superman’s grandfather, Seg-El. At the time, Seg-El had made only a handful of comic book appearances.) Eventually, SyFy bought the show, and we stumbled our way into production. I think there were some good ideas in Krypton, but it really suffered from its crushingly restrictive budget limitations. Perhaps if we’d developed the show a few years later, when streaming was coming into its own, we might’ve found a larger audience and been given a proper budget. All that said, I met some great people on the show – Dave Kob, Owen Magee, Clare Lambe, and Paul Stewart, to name a few (who have all gone on to collaborate with me on Foundation).