Seth Rogen Is Shopping An Adaptation Of THE BOYS To Cable Nets

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have one Garth Ennis based TV show happening - Preacher is set up at AMC. But why stop there? Why have just the one Garth Ennis show when you can be the guys with a whole bunch of Garth Ennis TV shows on cable? That seems to be the theory, as they're out shopping around an adaptation of Ennis and Darick Robertson's The Boys to cable networks right now. Also involved: Eric Kripke, the creator of Supernatural. 

The Boys is another over-the-top comic from the madman Ennis. The title characters are a CIA black ops group tasked with monitoring and occasionally taking out superheroes. But the heroes in the universe of The Boys aren't the good guys we know from Marvel and DC - they're venal, corrupt, often excessively violent celebrities who often place civilians in danger. I've always seen The Boys as an escalation of Ennis' largely anti-superhero work in DC's Hitman. 

That anti-superhero sentiment got the title canceled at DC imprint Wildstorm after six issues, but the comic moved on to Dynamite where it went to 72 issues, Ennis' original plan for the book. That means, like Preacher, there's a finished work to adapt for TV that can have a beginning, middle and end. 

It's all still early days, as the producers are trying to see where the show winds up. That means it's too early to speculate whether Simon Pegg is going to get the call to play the lead, Wee Hughie, the main character of the comic who is clearly modeled after him. Maybe Pegg, now in his 40s, is too old for the role, although I think he's in the best shape of his life. I certainly wouldn't be against a weekly dose of Pegg on TV, even if he was doing a Scottish accent the whole time. 

The big question for me: will Rogen et al bring this to AMC or similar or are they holding out for pay cable, where they can really get into the violence and depravity of Ennis' work? If they can pull off Preacher at AMC maybe anything is possible.