whose X?
Thursday, April 12, 2001

Tribune Entertainment's upcoming syndicated show "Mutant X," has become embroiled in a legal battle with the studio 20th Century Fox, who wants to stop production on the series [...] Fox is claiming that the anticipated show is a look-alike of its box office hit "X-Men." "Mutant X," a co-production of Tribune, Marvel Comics and Fireworks Entertainment, chronicles the adventures of a group of human mutants who are bound together by extraordinary genetically engineered powers. [...] The new TV series is based on the "X-Men" series conceived in 1963. Marvel later sold film rights to the X-Men characters to Fox.

So ... basically Fox would be right, then, wouldn't they? Same characters, more or less, right? Or is there a difference somewhere that's invisible to the naked eye? How can you legally claim that you're not basing something on those characters when you really must be? (And what was Marvel thinking to sell rights that way?)

And if Studios USA is bailing on the hour-long action drama (cancelling Xena and Hercules in back to back years, bailing on both the half-hour versions of Jack of All Trades and Cleopatra 2525 and then pulling the plug on an expanded Cleopatra) because the market for it is vanishing, what on earth does Tribune Entertainment (Flash degraded ... I mean, enhanced site) think it's doing by expanding its commitment in that area? That adds another, presumably fairly expensive (can't do X-Men without special effects) series to a line-up that includes Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda (strangely enough, the highest rated original syndicated drama on television, despite alternating painfully dull scripts with simply painful scripts with some actually fairly interesting stories--it's fighting for the syndicated drama lead with Studios USA's Xena and MGM's Stargate SG-1), Earth Final Conflict (so heavily serial that it can't gain viewers as it chugs into its likely-to-be strike-delayed planned-to-be final season next year) and BeastMaster--for some reason, Tribune has, outside of SciFi, the strongest presence in science fiction/fantasy series of any of the netlets, networks, or cable outlets.

(It's worth noting that Studios USA is having a perfectly miserable season for its hour dramas, no matter where they air. Studios USA lists six hour-long dramas on its website: Hercules departed last season, Cleopatra 2525 and Xena depart this year, The District is having a tough time of it, and First Years was cancelled after three episodes. Only the Law and Order franchise (which gains another show next season, assuming the upcoming strikes don't eat it) is doing unarguably well. Even their one half-hour sitcom, Welcome To New York, has sailed into the sunset.)

On the other hand, Tribune owns so many stations that they can do what USA can't, and dictate to major market stations that they WILL show it, and they WILL put it into a decent time slot. Studios USA, meanwhile, was left to watch Xena and Cleopatra 2525 get orphaned into early morning time slots in many markets because they had no such leverage. Oddly, Studios USA never tried to send Cleopatra 2525 to SciFi, which would have made sense, given SciFi's largely male audience--you got beautiful, intelligent and improbably scantily-clad women kicking a rather astonishing amount of ass on a weekly basis, with plots that were generally fairly interesting .... sounds like a match made in heaven, really. It shouldn't even have been a hard sell; Studios USA owns SciFi. For that matter, they could have shifted it to the flagship USA Network, which is taking a pounding now that it's lost wrestling, yielding first place in the cable ratings to (I believe) Nickelodeon.

Strange are the ways of the television biz.

© 2001 Iain Jackson, after-words.org

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