Press Release
IDW Entertainment And Entertainment One Television Bringing Secret Service Drama Cobb To Television
Thania St. John Writing the Pilot and Serving as Showrunner
Los Angeles/San Diego, CA – IDW Entertainment and Entertainment One Television (eOne Television) announced today that Secret Service drama COBB is being developed for television under their first-look co-production agreement.
COBB is being developed as a television series and is based on the acclaimed IDW Publishing property written by Beau Smith. Veteran television writer and producer Thania St. John (Covert Affairs, Chicago Fire) is writing the pilot and will serve as showrunner on the series.
COBB is a conspiracy thriller following Frank Cobb, a top ranking Secret Service agent, whose life gets turned upside down when he is removed from active duty after stumbling onto a deadly conspiracy at the highest global level. He must win back his reputation and save the newly elected President of the United States.
“There is no margin for error when guarding the President of the United States, but the men and women of the Secret Service are only human, as we've learned this week” said St. John. “This show explores how one agent's heroism - or mistake - can affect global security. And how a conspiracy at unthinkable levels can exist, even in an era of total surveillance and transparency.”
Smith said, "The best protection the President can have is courage...and Cobb. I look forward to seeing this courage and Cobb come alive in this new television series based on my character."
Executive Producing the series are Ted Adams and David Ozer from IDW Entertainment, John Morayniss, Michael Rosenberg, and Benedict Carver from eOne, and David Alpert and Rick Jacobs from Circle of Confusion (Walking Dead).
“COBB is a thrilling project with shocking twists and turns, and we are excited to build on our collaboration with our partners at IDW Entertainment, who not only have unmatched access to a goldmine of properties with international appeal, but also an immensely talented team with whom to produce and bring these projects to life,” said Morayniss, CEO, eOne Television. “Thania has an amazing track record and we are so pleased that she is on board.”
“Thania is a highly accomplished writer/producer, bringing a wealth of information about the Secret Service,” said Ozer, IDW Entertainment President, “COBB brings viewers inside the inner workings of this top government agency.”
IDW Entertainment and eOne Television entered into a partnership in April 2014 to co-develop, co-fund and co-produce television series based on IDW’s extensive library of over 300 original properties, with the intent of securing direct-to-series commitments for network and cable television. The companies will jointly represent the U.S. network sales, and eOne will be responsible for the international distribution of programming.
Replies
Wow, I never thought I'd hear about Cobb again. Good luck to Beau Smith (definitely an underrated talent) on this. This was a good miniseries, but the real highlight of it was the Eduardo Barretto art -- which can't really be replicated on TV, even if he were still alive.
I'll have to reread this, though -- I really did enjoy it a bunch.
I didn't know a thing about it, Rob, so every word of your post was educational. What else can you tell me about it?
It was a 3-part series, IIRC, black and white, that came out maybe 10 years ago? It's very much an action movie on paper. Cobb's a hero in the Die-Hard/Mac Bolan mode, no superpowers, just tough-guy skills. It could work very well as a TV show -- but it has so much TV/action movie in its DNA that I'm surprised someone is adapting it rather than just coming up with their own property. It's not like the name will sell it; Cobb's not exactly a known property.
But I'm sure Smith found the comics a very valuable tool in order to make the appeal of the project clear, and to get it optioned and into development. It's not gonna blow your mind, but IIRC, it's a good story, with the wonderfully clear and fluid artwork of Eduardo Barretto.
Always loved Barretto. He could draw no wrong in my book.
It took a little while for me to appreciate him. The only person I wanted on Titans at the time was Perez, and so I was dissatisfied with his run, despite it being his usual terrific job. And then the next time I noticed his art was on The Shadow Strikes! -- which was basically a book I resented because it replaced the much more avant-garde Helfer-Baker Shadow series. So I'm only now going back to collect those books.
That's funny, Rob, in that your experience is almost the opposite of mine!
I've never been a fan of George Perez's work -- insert angry villagers with pitchforks and torches here -- so I really enjoyed Barretto's work on Titans and would have pleased to see him stay on permanently. I loved his shading and rendering -- something almost non-existent in Perez's work at the time -- and I loved his women, who were amazingly sexy. (Perez's women always looked like plastic dolls to me.)
Ditto with The Shadow -- I hated the Helfer-Baker Shadow (especially when they put his head on a robot body), because I love the 1920s gangster milieu and venomous atmosphere of The Shadow, which they dumped in favor of sci-fi/satire. Imagine if DC announced that Batman was now going to be a dumb robot that people made fun of, and you can imagine my reaction to The Shadow's "revamp." So when Barretto returned the character to a noir atmosphere oozing with old-fashioned menace, I cheered -- and loved Barretto all over again.
Of course, my experience and yours -- and our tastes -- are different, and viva la horse races. But it's fun to see how we both ended up in the same place from wildly different paths!
You might want to go back and check out those old Shadow issues again, with the knowledge that they're not the Shadow for all time, but just a weird diversion. You might see more in them than you did the first time. I wasn't terribly familiar with the character -- the Chaykin revival from a few years before were the first Shadow comics published in the time I was collecting -- so he wasn't sacrosanct in any way to me. And being a kid, history didn't have the appeal to me that it does now.
As for Perez, he's slipped a little in my estimation as I've gotten older. I still think he's great -- but the stories he wants to draw and the ones I want to read don't intersect quite as much anymore. I'd love to see him again on a solo book -- one hero, one villain at a time -- for a solid run. Get him out of the group-scene groove he's been on pretty much since Crisis, and instead take the time to establish a hero and his supporting cast. A year long run of Flash, say, or a Black Canary title. I think he'd do wonders on a book like that. But in the giant space-time slobberknockers he usually draws, there's too much staging for him to really get back to individual character work.
Man, I remember Cobb. Blast from the past for sure. I liked it, but it wasn't real memorable. Good for Beau Smith I hope he is getting a decent paycheck out of it.
Oh, and I like both Perez and Barreto.