Highly Scripted - Battlefield: Bad Company's TV Show
There's a joke somewhere in here about the current state of first-person shooters and the idea that this is a natural evolution seeing as we're already basically watching them anyway, but I'm not gonna touch it. And also, that was the whole joke. Battlefield: Bad Company (which is actually quite good; that's why I didn't want to peg it with a lowball gag, you see) is coming to oversized living room PC monitors near you by way of EA and Fox. If nothing else, it stars the main characters from the game and isn't getting Hollymorphed into - I don't know - the gripping, fart-ripping tale of two buddy cop bros (both played by Mark Wahlberg) and their talking dog, Dubstep. That's promising, right?
Here's the elevator pitch, courtesy of Deadline Hollywood:
"Written by [former Alias executive producer] John Eisendrath, Bad Company features the main characters from the game. It follows four renegade soldiers as they exit military life and enter the private sector. But trouble is never far behind as they realize their commanding officer had used them to further the ends of a shadow unit within the government and now wants them dead to cover his tracks."
Happy Madison’s Doug Robinson is also attached to the production, along with EA’s Patrick Bach and Patrick O’Brien. And hey, the Bad Company games had some pretty funny bits, so this could actually end up fairly amusing. Then again, they were also about precisely zero of the things in that description, so I guess the show itself is also going rogue. Just, you know, from its source material.
Then again, the idea of a 100 percent faithful adaption of a game into any other medium has always stricken me as pretty silly ("Hours of shooting the same dudes again and again! Cliched writing and no character development! Huddling behind rocks to engage mutant healing powers!"), so who knows? But honestly, has any game-centric TV show gotten off the ground? Ever? I mean, Metro and Ghost Recon had some cracking live-action shorts, and Defiance is hitting Syfy next year - but I'm talking season-based, episode-per-week fare. On that front, there's been... um. Well, there was that horrendous Code Monkeys thing on G4 years ago. Does that count? I guess, though, if anyone can make it happen, it's EA. But really, do we want them to?