“We talked about doing a TV show actually since the first Blade film,” Goyer says. “We tossed around a couple of different ideas. But something I realized [was] that in order to do it for TV, we had to do something that TV could do better than the features. And one of the things that the fans always seemed to be really interested in were all the inner workings and machinations of the vampire world. So we tried to come up with an idea that would allow us to explore that more. So what the series is, in a weird way, is kind of like a Wise Guy with vampires. Jill [Wagner’s] character [who portrays Krista Starr, a woman seeking revenge for the death of her brother by a vampire] is kind of a double agent working for Blade within the vampire community … [It’s] treating vampires sort of like the ultimate crime family. Blade realizes at the beginning of the pilot that he’s not making much headway just sort of hacking and slashing... that he needs to know more about their inner workings and hierarchy. And that’s kind of what the TV show is.”
Goyer explains that since television obviously allows the Blade writers to further flesh out the universe that the character lives in - through multi-episode arcs as opposed to being constrained to a two-hour feature film every few years – the proposed series will as a result depict aspects of Blade’s past that we’ve yet to see on screen.
“Clearly, the point of going into the TV show is that we can explore more of his background, more of his history from the time he was first on the streets, even before he met the Whistler character,” he says. “It’s a pretty hard-edged show. It’s certainly harder-edged than anything that can be on network television, which is also fun. But it’s going to be a slow roll. I know a little goes a long way. We’ll definitely be learning more about him and his background and who his natural father was and things like that. But that’s sort of the super arc of the whole series.”
The show will largely take place after the time period of the Wesley Snipes movies, though Goyer says that knowing the films will not be a prerequisite for following the TV movie and series. He also adds that the pilot film is fairly heavy in terms of effects work.
“We did a lot more [f/x] than I thought we’d be able to do on the pilot,” he says. “There’s quite a bit of mayhem in the pilot. There’s sort of a mayhem quota I think we’re going to have to meet, even on an episodic budget. We’re already in the process of scripting the next five or six episodes. And some of the episodes are a little lighter on mayhem and some are a little heavier on mayhem. Usually there’s one or two things per episode that you wouldn’t normally see on television. But there's also a lot of suspense and things like that. Even in some of my favorite shows, like The Wire or Sopranos, there will be a slow burn for a couple of episodes and then something extreme will happen. That’s sort of what we’re doing with this.”