In case you missed the news last week, Fox is developing two television shows set in the world of their X-Men movie universe. The first, Legion, stars David Heller, Professor X’s son whose multiple personalities each come with a different superpower. The other TV show,
, features the Hellfire Club, a group of villains that most recently appeared in X-Men: First Class. With multiple live action X-Men series on the way, that got us here at ComicBook.com thinking about what other X-Men properties would make for great TV series. The obvious answer of course is “GIVE ALL THE X-MEN TELEVISION SHOWS”, but we’ve narrowed our list down to five potential shows.
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[Please note that our list mainly includes characters and concepts that haven’t appeared in movies. As much as we’d all love to see a TV show about Wolverine and Deadpool running a pizza shop in Boston, it’ll never happen.]
Dazzler
Fox has run with a few musically inclined series over the last few years. They first stumbled across an easy moneymaker with Glee, a TV show about a bunch of kids who knew how to sing really catchy autotune versions of classic songs. Earlier this year, they found another hit in Empire, a song about a hip hop musical dynasty. You know what would make Fox even more money? A musical TV show featuring mutants. Dazzler would be the perfect solo act to bring to television, because glam is always in style and disco never died. Find some aspiring young signer who can act, toss in Longshot and Lila Chaney as supporting cast members, and Fox has an easy hit on its hands.
The X-Club
Another staple of Fox is the sci-fi procedural, as the network has aired both successful shows like X-Files and Fringe and not so successful shows like Minority Report and Being Human. With more episodes of the X-Files on the way, why not add a team of plucky mutant scientists/explorers to compliment the series? Enter the X-Club, a team of mutant (and non-mutant) scientists created by Beast to search for a way to reactivate the X-Gene in mutants across the world. Fox could easily retool the concept for television (with the X-Club searching for answers for any number of scientific based mysteries) starring Dr. Nemesis, a cranky, nearly immortal superscientist with a penchant for violence and shooting enemies with syringes With obscure characters like Madison Jeffries and a sentient version of the Danger Room, there’s little risk of an X-Club series stomping on the toes of any future movies.
Madrox Investigations
When Fox announced they were developing several shows based on the X-Men, just about everyone expected one would be based on Peter David’s recent X-Factor run, featuring Jamie “Multiple Man” Madrox running a private investigative firm. Madrox’s motley crew of detectives included recognizable characters like Strong Guy, Siren, M, Wolfsbane and Rictor, who clashed with each other almost as much as they clashed with supervillains. Crime procedurals are always popular, and a series based on the witty and often drama filled series would be perfect for a cable outlet like FX.
District X
Speaking of crime procedurals, Fox can always adapt District X if they were looking to mix cop drama with mutants. The original District X comic series followed Bishop and his human partner, Ismael Ortega, as they handled the daily beat in the “Mutant Town” neighborhood of New York. Not only did Bishop and Ortega deal with commonplace hate crimes against mutants, they also dealt with drug trafficking, rival mutant gangs and the emergence of the mysterious Mister M, a mutant with near godly abilities. District X could have a gritty feeling similar to The Wire or The Shield and could show how mutants not recruited into the X-Men deal with their powers.
Magik
While most X-Men comics have a science fiction slant, there are a few characters who cross into other genres. Magik, for instance, has a variety of magical abilities in addition to her mutant teleportation powers. Initially appearing as a small girl in the comics, Illyana Rasputin is trapped in the hellish dimension of Limbo for seven years, gaining magical abilities and losing a part of her soul in the process. After becoming the ruler of Limbo, Illyana returns to Earth, battling demons and trying to regain her humanity. While a magic based mutant show might sound like a tough sell, shows like Supernatural, Lucifer and Game of Thrones show that magic never goes out of style.
