Hey There, There Goes a 'Spider-Girl'

With more networks and streaming services getting into original programming everyday, the demand for televised content is greater than ever. In Adapt This! we spotlight a piece of previously unadapted material we’d love to see become a TV series and even suggest a potential network and creative team.  

Spider-Girl

Source Material: Created as a literal “What If,” Peter Parker’s spider-powered teenage daughter proved popular enough with readers to headline several solo comic books (including Spider-Girl and The Amazing Spider-Girl) and still pops up as a back-up feature in her dad’s various titles. (By the way, the character shouldn’t be confused with Spider-Woman, a separate heroine with no relation to the Parker clan.)

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Thumbnail Synopsis: Back in 1998, Marvel Comics mainstay Tom DeFalco dreamed up the MC2 line of comics, which imagined an alternate future in which the job of superhero-ing fell to a group of newer, younger characters like a fresh-faced group of Avengers and Spider-Girl aka May “Mayday” Parker, the child of now-retired Spider-Man, Peter Parker, and his long-suffering model girlfriend-turned-wife, Mary Jane Watson. A 15-year-old firecracker, May didn’t really need spider-powers to become the confident, outgoing teen her father most definitely wasn’t during his high school years. But boy, did she take advantage of her abilities once they emerged, taking her dad’s “with great power comes great responsibility” mantra to heart and tangling with new villains like Raptor and Killerwatt, as well as such vintage Papa Spidey rogues as Hobgoblin and Carnage.

Why It Would Make Great TV: After a shaky start with the underwhelming launch of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Marvel’s TV arm has buffed up its creative muscles by drilling down and putting their shows ahead of their superheroes. To wit, the creatively revitalized S.H.I.E.L.D. is now a densely-serialized espionage story instead of a case-of-the-week procedural with a revolving cast of super-baddies. Meanwhile, Marvel’s second network series Agent Carter functioned as a crackling post-World War II period piece, pleasantly punctuated by feats of kick-ass derring-do. And now there’s Netflix’s just-launched Daredevil, a 13-episode crime story that’s more interested in crusading lawyer Matt Murdock than his alter ego’s extracurricular vigilante activities.

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Spider-Girl, then, offers Marvel the chance to break into yet another new genre: high school dramedy. Done right, a Spider-Girl series could be the My So-Called Life or Freaks and Geeks of comic book television, a coming-of-age story that captures the emotional roller coaster ride of that pivotal four-year timespan through the eyes of a teen girl juggling her family’s legacy and her own evolving identity. In that way, the series could correct some of the mistakes made by its direct predecessor in this space, the DC Comics-inspired Smallville, a series that started with good intentions, but suffered from an initially endearing, and ultimately off-putting campiness, not to mention scripts of dubious quality. Smallville was also allowed to run well-past its sell-by date, finally wheezing to a close when not-a-Superboy-not-yet-a-Superman was well out of high school. That’s another argument in favor of Spider-Girl only spanning Orientation Day to Graduation Day.

Besides Angela Chase and Lindsay Weir, Buffy Summers would be another obvious role model for Mayday Parker, as that series was never better than during the characters’ high school years, when Joss Whedon and his ace writing staff brilliantly grafted horror tropes onto standard, everyday teen dramas like picking a date to prom or breaking up with a bad boyfriend. Buffy also was (and still is) incredibly funny, and a good sense of humor is a crucial part of both Spider-Man and Spider-Girl’s DNA. In fact, one could argue that neither big-screen incarnation of the Web Head we’ve seen thus far — Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man and Andrew Garfield’s Amazing Spider-Man — has really captured that aspect of Spidey’s identity. Interestingly, Marvel has confirmed that they’ll be taking Spider-Man back to high school in his next appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A Spider-Girl series would be an ideal complement to Spider-Man’s cinematic future, as a four-season series could more fully explore the highs and lows of being a teenage superhero more fully than a two-hour summer blockbuster.

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Creative Dream Team: If Buffy is our platonic ideal for Mayday, we’d want to entrust the character to one of that show’s top writers, specifically Jane Espenson. (Whedon himself would be great, of course, but he’s a big-time movie director now and, besides, he’s taking a break from all things Marvel-related after delivering The Avengers: Age of Ultron on May 1.) Besides being a battle-tested veteran of genre television (her post-Buffy gigs include Battlestar Galactica, Torchwood, and Once Upon a Time), Espenson possesses a devilishly clever wit and a terrific ear for dialogue

As for who would be the right actress to deliver her words, Maisie Williams would be a blast, but Arya Stark is pretty much a superhero anyway. Instead we’re considering Modern Family’s Ariel Winter, a funny, talented performer ready to graduate beyond the dorky middle child she plays on that fading ABC sitcom. Plus, she comes equipped with comic book bona fides having voiced the Carrie Kelly version of Robin in DC’s animated Dark Knight Returns direct-to-DVD adaptation.

The final piece of the casting puzzle would be finding the right middle-aged Peter and Mary Jane Parker, to which we have only five words: Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton. Yes, again. Because what better parents could a fledgling Spider-Girl ask for than Coach and Mrs. Coach?  

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Ideal Network: Between Arrow and The Flash, the teen-skewing CW is DC-only territory right now, so Marvel wouldn’t be welcome in those parts. (Same goes for Fox and CBS, home to Gotham and a new Supergirl series — one in which the title character is in her early 20s rather than her teenage years — respectively.) An ABC Family berth would make the most sense, as that’s within the massive Disney umbrella that also houses Marvel and already has the built-in young adult (and young-at-heart adult) demo that the series would target out of the gate.

Collected volumes of Spider-Girl comics can be found in select comic book stores and on Amazon.