Part gritty cop drama. Part superhero comic. The graphic novel Powers by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming seemed destined for a live-action adaptation from the moment issues first hit stands. After an entire television pilot was made for and scrapped by the FX channel in 2011, however, there was a chance that this might never happen. Now, it looks to be that the live-action Powers will finally take to the streets. 
 
 According to Deadline, Powers is being developed by Sony Pictures TV as an exclusive series for the growing PlayStation Network video service. The TV series will take the form of a live-action, hour-long show, with approximately 10 episodes in the first season. Charlie Huston is the scriptwriter on the new Powers pilot, and former Falling Skies head writer Remi Aubuchon also is on board to share showrunner duties with Huston. Original comic book creators Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming are included as executive producers. 
 
 Written by Bendis with art by Oeming, Powers is an award-winning comic that has been running through various iterations since 2000. The comic mashes up cop drama with superpowers, as two Chicago Homicide detectives try to maintain order in a world where powered heroes and villains exist. Their beat is costumed crime -- they investigate the suspicious deaths of those with special abilities. Powers is a dark story once described by FX's President as "...in the model of David Fincher's Seven and Zodiac or The Shield. It's a really gritty, edgy, very real cop show. It also happens to have superhero elements in it, but not front and center – they're around the margins and the back of it." 
 
 A pilot episode of Powers was produced for FX in 2011, starring Jason Patric and Lucy Punch. It did not lead to an order for more episodes, and the pilot was never released to the public. Actors from that pilot episode have since been released from the production, and this new version of Powers will likely feature a new cast. 
 
 Despite passing on the first version of the show, FX continued to stress that Powers was alive and an important project for the company. Much like The Walking Dead was a comic book that meshed perfectly with the AMC style of storytelling when it was adapted for TV, Powers was being created for television as a show to fit in with FX's own original programs such as Sons of Anarchy and The Americans. It was while Powers was still with FX that Charlie Huston (known for his work on Moon Knight) came aboard; Huston is now said to be leading this PlayStation Network version of the show. 
 
 Over the years, IGN has made it a personal mission to ask studio heads about plans for the Powers TV show at every major industry event. Here's what FX’s president John Landgraf had to say in IGN's 2013 interview about Powers: 
 
 "We’ve been through so many incarnations. After we made the pilot, we actually developed three more [episode] scripts. So then we had a pilot plus three scripts, and we decided between the pilot and the scripts that it wasn’t quite the series that we needed it to be. When I say we, by the way, Brian Bendis is involved in every phase of this conversation and discussion. But one of the scripts was written by this guy named Charlie Huston, and he was a novelist. Both I and Brian and others thought, “Wow, there is actually something in the tone of this.” So Charlie was approached, I think by Brian, and said, “Look, would you be interested in taking on Powers?” And Charlie said, “Well, I’ve never actually adapted anything before in my life. I have only written novels and stuff of my own, but Powers is my favorite graphic novel, and yes!” 
 
 So what ended up happening was we reconstituted the whole thing around Charlie as the creator, with Brian. Charlie went up to Seattle, and they sat down and they talked, and read through all the books, and they came back with a new vision, basically. Essentially, a new pilot to begin with, which is a new, different story than the pilot that we shot. So that pilot is officially gone and dead, and the actors are all gone, but we’re developing a whole new pilot from scratch." 
 
 Sony is eager to gain a foothold in the streaming video market, as services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are quickly defining what the future of television watching will be for the next generation of cord-cutters. The company became a pioneer in producing original content available only via streaming when the anime Xam'd debuted exclusively on PSN in 2008. The video game reality show The Tester also was made exclusively for PlayStation Network and ran for three seasons. Not to be outdone, rival Microsoft also has exclusive programming in the works, with a Halo TV show for Xbox produced by Steven Spielberg leading as its flagship original series. ||||| Sony’s PlayStation video game console is the latest digital platform to enter the original programming space. Its first show will be hourlong drama Powers, based on the graphic novel by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. The series will be produced by PlayStation sibling Sony Pictures TV, where the project had been gestating for awhile and went through several incarnation at FX, including a pilot. Powers for PlayStation represents a brand new take on the source material, penned by Charlie Huston. Returning auspices include Circle of Confusion as well as Bendis, Oeming and Michael Dinner who will executive produce with Huston and Remi Aubuchon (Falling Skies), along with Circle of Confusion’s David Engel, David Alpert and Lawrence Mattis. Huston and Aubuchon will serve as showrunners. Combining the genres of superhero fantasy, crime noir and police procedural, Powers, whose order is said to be around 10 episodes, is set in a world full of people with superhuman abilities and where all of those powers are just another catalyst for mayhem and murder. The series follows Detective Christian Walker, who is in charge of protecting humans like us and investigating cases involving the God-like men and women, referred to as “powers,” who glide through the sky on lightning bolts and fire and who clash above cities in epic battle, oblivious to the mortals below. No start date is set yet for the series, which is expected to be of premium cable quality. SPT will sell internationally. The studio already has experience producing for digital platforms — it has a 13-episode order from Netflix for a drama series from the Damages creators. 
 
 PlayStation joins rival, Microsoft’s XBox, which announced Halo as its first original scripted series a year ago though the project doesn’t have a green light yet. 
 
 TV Editor Nellie Andreeva - tip her here.
– Move over Netflix; there's yet another new player in the online original TV programming arena. Sony has picked up the rights to Powers, a comic about homicide detectives who investigate cases involving superheroes, and intends to turn it into a live-action drama for its PlayStation Network, Deadline reports. The show will be produced by Sony Pictures Television. The company hasn't said whether users will pay for the show individually, or as part of a larger service. Sony is working on a pay-TV service that will offer traditional channels over the Internet, but the move is independent of that effort, the Wall Street Journal reports. Powers has been in development as a series for FX for years; a pilot was produced in 2011, but the network passed. IGN expects to see a new cast, because the original actors were released from their contracts. Sony's CEO says the company picked the show because "it overlays extremely well with the demographics of the PlayStation."