NBC Creates Its Own Batman With The Cape

[Tom Goldman]

NBC Creates Its Own Batman With The Cape

The number of caped superheroes appearing on television in the fall recently increased by one.

NBC has announced that it's picking up one-hour television show The Cape for the Fall 2010 broadcast season. The Cape is another journey for the network into superhero territory, but the series' main character has more in common with Batman than characters from NBC's now-canceled Heroes.

The Cape stars David Lyons as police officer Vince Faraday. Faraday gets caught up in a situation never seen before on television or in movies: He ends up framed for a series of murders. I know, crazy right? Faraday is presumed dead and goes into hiding, but leaves behind his wife and son, giving him a reason to remain connected to the real world in any way he can to keep them safe.

That way happens to be to don a hooded cape and superhero suit to battle the criminal element of Palm City. Cleverly enough, because Faraday dons a cape, he decides to call himself "The Cape" after his son's favorite comic book hero. Faraday has no actual superpowers to speak of, and is trained by a band of thieves.

Firefly's Summer Glau stars in the show as an investigative blogger also trying to take on crime and corruption in Palm City. She aides The Cape with her blogging expertise. The Cape's nemesis is billionaire Peter Fleming, played by James Frain, who seems to the opposite of Bruce Wayne, moonlighting as a twisted killer named Chess rather than a hero with bat ears. The show sounds pretty cool, let's hope it's done right and worthy of DVR space.

Source: Capesite.net [http://www.capesite.net/nbc-picks-up-the-cape/]

Image via Capesite.net

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[Quad08]

This sounds pretty awesome. Look forward to checking it out

 

[Citrus]

I've hated every superhero show that I've seen on TV. Heroes, Smallville... actually, those are the only ones that come to mind, but suffice it to say I didn't enjoy them. This one sounds promising, if a little cliche. If there's a hero any superhero show should be inspired by, Batman is probably the best one. But I have a feeling the show is going to suck anyway.

 

[Jared]

Kinda looks like a darker version of an Asasin Creed Assasin, lol

 

[Julianking93]

Looks like they just took Altair and gave him a black cloak.

 

[WorldCritic]

So they canceled Heroes for this, great.

 

[SilverHammerMan]

Effective disguise he's got there.
Kind of a silly costume, but these things always look bad in stills. Anyway it sounds okay, as long as it isn't too realistic, I don't want another Heroes-type show that will go on and on with the same story, I hope this series will be episodic.
Also, I desperately want to see him doing actual superheroics and battling supervillains instead of just beating the shit out of Russian mobsters and like. I think this show should follow in Human Target's footsteps and try not to take itself too seriously.

 

[RheynbowDash]

Is it just me, or does he look like Alex Mercer from [PROTOTYPE]?

 

[Outlaw Torn]

Heroes got the can? The last season was pretty crap but I didn't expect it to be stopped.

Not sure whether I like the sound of 'The Cape' though, I guess it is nice to see stuff like this that isn't from Marvel or DC but a lot of it appears too similar to other things even if they are twisted around a bit. They also seem to have picked surnames of historical scientists as their character names too. I imagine Summer Glau's character will be Something Curie or Someone Franklin.

 

[Archemetis]

OK, so obviously I've not checked the link so could find my answer by doing that, but it's something I would'a thought would be part of the article...

Is it a satirical take on the superhero genre?
'Cos from what I read I can't take it at all seriously.

If it is satire, then I'll give it a shot and watch it whenever it appears in Britain but if it's honestly trying to be serious I think I'll give it a miss.

 

[SnootyEnglishman]

This looks pretty cool. I may even check this out.

 

[Therumancer]

Interesting, but for some reason it makes me think of "Night Man", "Mantis" or "Black Scorpian". At least Summer Glau has found work though.

Truthfully this might have some chance of success depending on how well they do the action. The market is rife for it, and one of the problems that seems to plague a lot of concepts like "Heroes" and "The 4400" is a limited budget, when people should be using their powers within a storyline, they don't BECAUSE every time something "super" happens it costs money. This is also why I think a lot of the things people wanted to see happen in "Heroes" like a really awesome fight between Peter and Sylar at the end of Season 1 never happened, simply put the budget for a TV show can't do something like that in a satisfying fashion. The flashier the powers, the less likely you'll get to see them that often.

A hero totally dependant on kung-fu and whatever... well that's been tried before with mixed results, but not with this level of mania. I could see it working at the moment.

Heck when they tried to do "Mutant X" despite having powers 99% of it degenerated to kung fu battles anyway... even when characters could do things like throw lightning.

I'm a little sad they couldn't come up with a better backstory though.

 

[Bladecatcher]

"Blogging expertise"? Really? I mean, I get that its a modern take on the archetypal superhero reporter, but it just sounds a little...lame. I guess I'll have to watch to find out, but IMO the characters sound pretty weak.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Looks a bit like a cheezy ripoff of Garrett from the Thief series, honestly.

She aides The Cape with her blogging expertise.

How... how, exactly, does this work? Is she going to Tweet crimes in progress to him? Or update her Facebook with "just saw teh cape guy, wow he beat up a mugger, lol" reports?

 

[Abedeus]

Heroes got canceled? Thank God, I don't need an excuse to not watch the last season... Season 4's ending was horrible enough.

Oh... investigative blogger? Blogger, by definition, is the OPPOSITE of investigating - instead of finding out things about other people, they talk all the time about THEMSELVES. It's basically a "agoraphobic wanderer" or "snail running the marathon".

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

I've hated every superhero show that I've seen on TV. Heroes, Smallville...

I liked Heroes for most of the first season, and Smallville was at least kind of entertaining for the first two, but by the third season it got worse than even Heroes ever did, and that's pretty bad. They're definitely not for everyone, and if you didn't catch either one at the beginning, they pretty quickly became not for anyone.

Also, my prediction is that this will last at most two seasons, if not less, because that's how shows with Summer Glau in them work, right?

 

[samsonguy920]

Vince Faraday gets caught up in a situation never seen before on television or in movies: He ends up framed for a series of murders. I know, crazy right?

Tom, you crazy, crazy guy. I saw what you did there!

This does have quite the cool premise. It may have some stuff used before but at least that stuff has had a chance to gather dust first. But I'm betting the only way this will fly is if people go into it not thinking it's some kind of Heroes spinoff. Heroes had its run, time to let someone else be heroic. I look forward to when this ends up on Hulu or such. Since I don't have cable.

Cable guys scare Bert. Stop looking at me like that.

 

[Woodsey]

Didn't they just describe Zorro?