Hulu and Marvel's Tigra & Dazzler series on hold after entire writing team gets fired

The course of Marvel’s TV offerings has never run as smoothly as that of their cinematic siblings—possibly because, unlike with the movies, the TV side of the company’s superhero equation has had to make do with smaller budgets and a far wider array of corporate masters. (The entire, very deliberate self-destruction of the company’s Netflix TV brands being just one such example out of many.) Still, there’s bad, and then there’s “Whoops, we just fired our entire writing staff 15 weeks into production” bad, which appears to be what just befell Hulu’s animated Tigra & Dazzler show.

Executive produced and starring comedian Chelsea Handler—still attached, by the by—the animated series was/is supposed to offer a fun, adult take on superhero comedy, to the extent that it’s supposed to be the third of four projects out of a whole slate of adult-oriented comic book cartoons for the service, culminating in an event coming some time next year called The Offenders. (Ugh.) But THR reports that both showrunner Erica Rivinoja (Girls Trip), and the show’s entire writing staff, were “dismissed” today over unnamed creative concerns, meaning that there’s now literally nobody around to write this tale of two “woke superheroes” looking for respect in a city full of superpowered folks.

Correspondingly, the series has been put on “pause,” as Marvel hunts for a new showrunner, with new writers, and new scripts, to offer up a second, new draft on the series. All four animated Marvel Hulu shows—which also include M.O.D.O.K., Hit-Monkey, and Howard The Duck—were picked up by the Disney-controlled streaming service back in February; the other three are still reportedly in good shape. Sources at Marvel have suggested, somewhat surprisingly, that none of this had anything to do with the big shake-up that saw TV production shift to operate under Marvel Golden Child Kevin Feige recently; they apparently, uh, just really didn’t like the scripts.