Make Girls Superpowered

On Monday, we learned that Kyle Chandler is coming back to television (exciting) on HBO (cool) in the latest superhero story from the DC universe (okay, sure, I guess). The former Coach Taylor is playing Hal Jordan, also known in the comics as one of the Green Lanterns, in a show where he’s mentoring a younger Lantern named John Stewart. The show’s created by Ozark’s Chris Mundy, Watchmen’s Damon Lindelof and comics writer Tom King, but the real tell of what’s going on is the way the series is described. Per the Hollywood Reporter, the show has an earthbound plot and a “gritty, True Detective vibe.” That sounds familiar! HBO just put out another show, its extension of the Batman universe about the Penguin, which is very much a “The Sopranos vibe.” (I’m quoting myself.) In an increasingly fractured media ecosystem, the path forward for HBO, now under the larger WarnerMedia banner, is clear: Remake all your most acclaimed television shows, but put superheroes in them. It’ll get viewers who are fans of the franchise, and people who just like things in the shape of other media they already know and love! We know you need more than two entries in a list to make a trend piece, but because we’re solution oriented over here at Vulture, we’ve come up with some elevator pitches to fill out the rest of HBO’s upcoming slate. Casey Bloys (or one of your many Twitter/X bots), you’re welcome! —Jackson McHenry

The Leftovers

In a universe where — to use Zack Snyder’s preferred framing — superhuman gods live among us and engage in regular battle on the fields of Metropolis, Atlantis, and, uh, the ’80s, regular human lives would often be upended logistically, materially, and spiritually. And what tends to thrive in the spaces where people’s sense of spiritually is rocked so fundamentally? Cults. The Leftovers dealt with the aftermath of the “sudden departure” of a chunk of the population long before Thanos snapped his meaty, begloved digits. Since this is DC, the massive battle in Justice League between our titular heroes and the forces of Steppenwolf would be enough to send thousands of people fleeing their families to dress in white and do a lot more smoking and a lot less talking. The superheroes of the DC universe will find it easier to battle mythic forces of evil from other realms of existence than to try to get one of the Guilty Remnant to budge from their nihilist principles. This sounds very much like a job for Robert Pattinson’s Emo Batman. —Joe Reid

Enlightened

More than the lead of almost any other HBO show, Enlightened’s Amy Jellicoe is basically already a superhero. She is a normal woman who undergoes an intense change at the beginning of the series and struggles to figure out how to use her privilege to be a good person moving forward. That’s basically Peter Parker! Now, imagine Amy also has, like, superstrength or something. Her ex-husband pisses her off? She’ll regret punting his ugly denim jacket across the city. Abandonn is destroying the literal world? Maybe a higher up (Damon) needs to be sent through a few cubicles à la The Incredibles. The impulsivity and the struggles and the care are all still there, only heightened. Plus, this would get Mike White back into a cynical but maybe optimistic show as opposed to the sadder, meaner, slightly less-good hit he currently writes. —Jason P. Frank

Girls

Set Girls in the Bushwick of Gotham or Metropolis. The girls have no relationship to superheroes or crime whatsoever — they’re all pursuing careers in media and/or the arts — but once an episode the show’s Hannah lists all her problems like, “Not only did I lose my internship and my bi ex has only dated women since we stopped sleeping together, but Mr. Freeze froze the green line today so I had to walk like 20 blocks to go to this stupid Stepping to Lin-Manuel Miranda class. I was so tired I ended up skipping it and just getting a smoothie.” Or there would be an episode where the show’s Shoshanna has bad allergies and accidentally does drops. This is what the untitled Rachel Sennott show should be. —Jesse David Fox

Somebody Somewhere

Suffering from a midlife crisis, Sam returns to her home in small-town Manhattan, Kansas, after the death of her sister, where she learns to reconnect with old friends and rebuild a sense of community around her. Meanwhile, there’s some strange shit going on in the next town over, Smallville, where a teen boy appears to develop inexplicable powers while trying to live a normal high-school life. —Nicholas Quah

Doll & Em

Do you remember the underseen, lightly satirical but cutting two-season HBO series about a fictionalized version of the real-life friendship between British actresses Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells? It was great! In season one, Dolly, who is less famous, moved to Hollywood and took a job as Emily’s assistant and then got more attention than her. In season two, set in New York, they put on a play about their own lives, starring Evan Rachel Wood and Olivia Wilde. This would be easy to superhero-ize, because you can make the power dynamic that Emily Mortimer has superpowers but Dolly Wells doesn’t, but then they get switched around magically. Or maybe it’s that, in the DC universe there is also a cottage industry of prestige Oscar-bait biopics, but their biopics are about their universes’ great men (a.k.a. superheroes), so Emily Mortimer has a regular gig playing the superheroes’ wives and moms in these biopics, while Dolly wants to audition for some of those roles herself. A parade of British character actors who have actually played functionary roles in DC projects (Jeremy Irons, etc.) cameo as themselves. —J.M.

Deadwood

It’s 1790; everyone’s wearing weird wigs and hosiery and calling each other Yankees. The streets are full of mud and manure and a bunch of 20-somethings somehow just won a war against the world’s dominant global power. Now they have to figure out how to make themselves into an actual country. And they’re going to do it, for some reason, in a swamp at the edge of Maryland and Virginia, based on one French guy’s elaborate utopian map: the dream of an idealized national capitol built with slave labor. They have to incorporate pre-existing settlements onto the site; they have to persuade literally anyone to want to live there rather than any other city in the world that already exists. Wait, did we not mean putting TV in the District of Columbia? Can we redo this list but for that? Or, I don’t know, the founding of Gotham City or whatever. —Kathryn VanArendonk