Because nothing can assuage the God-fearing hearts of America’s armchair detectives like a steady stream of formulaic crimes, charming detectives, and busted punks, Fox has revealed that its adaptation of DC Comics’ Lucifer will leaven all of that “Prince of Evil” stuff by including a healthy helping of police procedural elements. The network revealed the show’s new direction in the same press release where it announced that it was giving the series a formal pilot order—as opposed to the put pilot commitment it gave the series last fall, because the only things more complicated than the byzantine byways of Hell are the intricacies of TV development contracts.
The new pilot will see DC’s charming, David Bowie-inspired take on the Devil—who first appeared in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and starred for six years in his own Mike Carey-written Vertigo series—leaving Hell for Los Angeles, “where he helps the LAPD punish criminals.” It’s not clear at this time whether Lucifer will also be helping detectives investigate the crimes he’s punishing people for, or if Fox will just be airing a bunch of scenes of Satanic, sadistic torture, just like your Aunt Barbara has been hysterically insisting for years.
Clues to the show’s divergence from its source material can be seen in the pedigrees of its newly announced executive producers, Jerry “A CSI In Every City by 2020” Bruckheimer and Len Wiseman, whose Sleepy Hollow similarly blends supernatural elements with police investigations. Californication creator Tom Kapinos, whose other supernatural pilot, Dead People, was picked up by The CW earlier this month, wrote the pilot and is serving as an executive producer on the show.