LOS ANGELES How do you take a story born in comic books that most people know from the movies and successfully adapt it for television?
If youre ABC and Marvel Entertainment, very, very carefully.
Marvels Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., a science-fiction drama about a human espionage agency that interacts with superheroes, arrives on Sept. 24 amid a full-fledged Hollywood hype-nado. And understandably so: The series is a spinoff of The Avengers, a movie that took in $1.5 billion worldwide last year, selling roughly 78 million tickets in North America alone. If 28 percent of those ticket buyers tune in for the first episode, S.H.I.E.L.D. will rank as the highest-rated new drama in a decade which would be a huge win for ABC, which is in need of fresh hits.
But television shows, unlike movies, prove themselves not on their marketing-amplified arrivals but week after Nielsen-scrutinized week. And Marvel, which has never made a live-action series before, faces breathtaking challenges by that measure.
About 75 percent of new programs on the broadcast networks fail to make it past a single season, killed by competition from the Web and cable (and sometimes by plain old bad writing). Marvel and ABC are trying to pull off the hardest trick in television: marrying two mismatched audiences. Marvel has a largely male fan base; ABC is the female-focused land of Dancing With the Stars and the soapy Scandal.
To succeed, said Jeph Loeb, Marvels top TV executive, weve got to tell stories that appeal not just to what we affectionately refer to as the Marvel zombies, but to a broader audience affectionately referred to at ABC as the Scandal women.
To achieve that ambitious goal the safe strategy would be to pick one audience or the other Marvel and ABC started with a direct-to-DVD short film called Item 47. Or, rather, Robert A. Iger did.
Last year, Mr. Iger, chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, which owns both Marvel and ABC, watched Item 47 and spotted the ingredients of a TV show. (Its rare for a chief executive, even in Hollywood, to involve himself in a fledgling series, but Mr. Iger did start his career at ABC in 1974, ultimately becoming its chairman.) In Item 47, which was released on The Avengers DVD, two ordinary citizens discover a weapon left behind by aliens; S.H.I.E.L.D., which stands for Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, steps in and saves the day.
With its intimate feel, the short film personified what a Marvel live-action television show could be, said Alan Fine, president of Marvel Entertainment. Joss Whedon, who directed The Avengers and has a TV resume that includes Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the less-successful Dollhouse, agreed to help create a series and direct the pilot episode.
