John Rogers — who wrote the superb pilot for the stillborn TV show based on Warren Ellis's excellent comic Global Frequency — has a new TV show in the works, called Leverage. TNT has a little trailer available (see embedded video above) and I was able to see the whole thing via BitTorrent. On the strength of both, I'd say that Leverage has the potential to be the first new TV show in more than five years that I would actually put my butt on the couch for, every week, without fail.
Leverage is an hour-long tensely plotted, technologically literate heist/caper show whose likable, flawed, comedic foursome of infiltration specialists are well-cast, funny, and given some damned good lines. The direction and camerawork is distinctive and fearsomely great: this show feels like a graphic novel (in a good way) — that fast-moving, highly visual, stylized thing that the Wachowskis got so right in the first Matrix movie. It's a really neat trick: it feels like a cinematic graphic novel, one of those graphic novels
that appears to be setting up every panel like it was a camera-shot. But
those novels always transcend what a mere camera could do (because the
artist is more flexible than the lens), so it was freaky to see a camera
mimicking the stuff that the notional "hypercamera" of graphic novels uses.
Rogers is also a comics writer (Blue Beetle, among other things) and has had a diverse history in the field. I've been lucky enough to hang out with him a couple of times, and he really feels like "one of us" — a net-centric geek with a gigantic D&D collection, a nonstop sense of humor, and a lust for all things gadgety.
See also: Screenwriter of cancelled, leaked Warren Ellis pilot marvels at his fanbase
