There are some things that are just doomed to fail. In one aspect, you feel bad for those things, but in another, more deeply felt way, you pretty much wish you could say to higher ups "Why the fuck did you think this was a good idea?"
And so it goes with Fox's adaptation of Lucifer; of all the things they could've done with the comic series, they seem to have picked all of the wrong ones.
Take for example, the central conceit: Lucifer; enjoying his self-imposed exile from Hell; lives it up in Los Angeles club owner. In the comic, he creates his own universe to be God of, for no other reason than to piss off his Father and do something He couldn't see coming. In the show, he fights crime; solving murders and bringing wrong-doers to whatever kind of justice he can manufacture in a supremely unjust world. The other main difference is Lucifer's main power: Instead of keeping the fire that ignited every star in the universe, the show has him making eye contact and getting murder suspects to tell him their deepest, darkest desire. Because that's the kind of exciting television everyone wants to see.
The main problem with this change is that the show gives itself the rather unenviable task of answering "Why the fuck does the Devil care about people killing each other?"
The answer the series provides is that it's the Devil's role in the universe to punish the guilty and the sinful, so it's only natural that he continues to fulfill that role in a more earthly presence. So in finding and punishing the guilty to avenge the innocent, he fulfills his role in God's plan on his own terms. The problem with that, though, is to tell that story the series has to disregard everything the source material did and said to make it the kind of story anyone would want to adapt in the first place.
To be fair; it's not like you can adopt Mike Carey's run as a TV show; let alone a network one. If you actually tried to tell the main story of Lucifer trying anything and everything to escape God's plan and be absolutely free of him- and portray it as a heroic thing to do- than no one would give you the chance to adapt the series at all, in any context. In a country that is so firmly rooted in Judaeo- Christian values as the U.S. any work showing the Devil as a heroic figure trying to escape the tyranny of God's omniscience is just going to get Fox lots and lots of angry letters, emails, and Facebook comments about how they're worshiping the devil and how all decent Christian people are going to boycott Fox and their advertiser's and blah blah blah. It's a stupid mess that Fox is right in avoiding and I don't really blame them for deciding to dodge that bullet and make Lucifer as bland and palatable as possible so they could get every eyeball they could sacrifice to the all-mighty advertiser.
But... it really didn't have to be this way. In the era of anti-heroes and comic book properties a show about the goddamned Devil would really seem to be the perfect thing to pick up and would basically pay for itself through "edgy" advertisers selling their wares to the comic book faithful. The executives at Fox must've thought they'd hit the demographic goldmine. And they probably would've, had they learned anything from NBC's failed attempt to bring Constantine to the air. Like Lucifer, Constantine was a series trying to capitalize on the comic book and anti-hero fervor of the day. But to make the character acceptable to a marketable audience, NBC had to cut the smoking, bisexuality, gore, and any other rough edges the original comic came with so they could actually air the thing. And while, it had a loyal fan base, it was too small to keep the show alive and it got cancelled after 13 episodes.
There were arguments at the time that the material would've been better served on basic cable, like the NBC Universal owned SyFy network, where the looser cable restrictions would've given the show a better chance at success and kept it on the air. I'm inclined to think that Lucifer is in a similar situation; on the network, the story is a flaccid shadow of itself, but on FX it could at least dive into its moral murkiness and be right at home with pretty much everything else on that network.
To give the Devil his due, you really have to question the whole system of morality that places him as the ultimate evil in the universe. The adaptation doesn't have the courage or the ambition to answer that question, but it also doesn't live in a world where it can have the audacity to answer let alone ask those kind of questions. If only it had a rebel archetype figure that existed to break down those walls, and could question the established authority it could model itself after. Than things could be really exciting.
RT
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