Wonder Woman: New David E. Kelley TV Show Shelved

For an Amazon princess who can fly and knows how to pilot an invisible plane, Wonder Woman’s projects certainly have a hard time getting off the ground. A Wonder Woman movie was in the works for several years before being shelved and now, the new live-action TV show has been put on hold as well.

Late last year, it was announced that David E. Kelley was developing a new Wonder Woman TV show, based on the iconic DC Comics character. The prolific TV creator later acknowledged that the project was still in the very early stages of development and said, “There’s no real deal in place yet, but yeah, my intent is to take a stab at it… I’ve been working on it between scripts for Harry’s Law. It’s a very, very different genre for me, a very tricky beast. I won’t know whether I’ve cracked it or not until I’ve finished it, but it’s going.”

Kelley apparently finished a spec script for the reboot and felt good enough about it that Warner Bros. Television shopped it around to the networks on Wednesday night.

Deadline reports that FOX and ABC were the first to pass. FOX wasn’t really considered a good fit anyway and ABC’s pass may have been motivated by the fact that the network’s owned by Disney, who now also owns DC competitor Marvel Comics. The studio’s already developing its own superhero projects with strong female lead characters.

The team at CBS was apparently split on on taking on the Wonder Woman show but ultimately passed. NBC was the last to decline. Executive changes already underway at the peacock network made it impossible to give the go-ahead on such an expensive venture. You may recall that NBC was burned when they tried their expensive reboot of Bionic Woman a couple years back.

The CW simply couldn’t afford it and, because of the expensive license fees, it’s highly unlikely that a cable channel would take the risk either.

Though the new Wonder Woman TV show seems dead, EW reports:

One source close to the project said the Wonder Woman team won’t give up on the project, even though it’s “not moving forward at this time.”

What do you think? Will this project ever be made? Is David E. Kelley the right man for the job? Could anybody make a new Wonder Woman series work?