Following last night's news that The CW has decided not to move forward with the current incarnation of its live-action Powerpuff Girls adaptation, the network's Chairman and CEO Mark Pedowitz has explained why they felt they needed to take another pass at the material.
“Sometimes things miss, and this was just a miss,” he told TVLine. “We believe in the cast completely, we believe in Diablo [Cody] and Heather [Regnier], the writers, and we believe in the auspices of [executive producer] Greg Berlanti and Warner [Bros.] Studios. In this case, the pilot didn’t work. But because we see enough elements in there, we’re going to give it another shot. We didn’t want to go forward with what we had.”
When asked to elaborate on what, specifically, went wrong with the pilot, Pedowitz said it came across a little "too campy."
“Tonally, it might have felt a little too campy. It didn’t feel as rooted in reality as it might have. But again, you learn things when you test things out. And in this case, we felt like, ‘Let’s take a step back and go back to the drawing board.'”
Pedowitz may not be aware that the scrapped pilot's script leaked online (yes, it was real) earlier today, but, to be honest, being overly campy didn't really seem to be the major problem!
At any rate, stars Chloe Bennet, Dove Cameron, Yana Perrault, and Donald Faison are expected to stay on board for whatever this new (hopefully much-improved) take on Powerpuff turns out to be, though the show is still not guaranteed to move forward.