Judge Dredd: Mega-City One - set for success?

Rebellion have announced that they are in the process of creating a new Judge Dredd television series, in cooperation with IM Global Television, which will be entitled Judge Dredd: Mega City One.  Previous screen adaptations the future cop have been problematic – the 1995 film was an infamous flop in which Sylvester Stallone removed the helmet and was kissed by Judge Hershey, the 2012 Dredd with its ugly ‘sandpaper for the eyes’ aesthetic stayed closer to the source material but didn’t trouble the box office.

                  The sounds coming out of Rebellion chief Jason Kingsley are encouraging: he wants the new series to capture the humour of the strip, something that the previous adaptations have ignored. The fact that Mega City One is included in the title is promising: the strip has always been more about the city than about Dredd himself, who, like Kermit trying to organise the Muppets, is the straightman trying to impose order on a world full of eccentrics and psychotics.  It will be interesting to see how successful the production team are at translating the wildness of Mega City One to the screen.  Will the skyscape be as incredible as the one dreamed up by Carlos Ezquerra with its curvy skyscrapers connected by roadways, shoots and tunnels? Will it include the crazes (designer ugliness, sky surfing, plastic bubble) subterranean mutants and undead villains for which the strip has become famous? Will it have the biting satire of the strip? The complete lack of sentimentality?

                The recently published Fast Food, the newest volume of Hachette’s Judge Dredd Mega Collection, perfectly encapsulates all that is good about Dredd. It follows the travails of the ‘fatties’, Mega City One’s monstrously obese inhabitants, as they fight for their rights, compete in illegal eating competitions and strive to reach the magical two tons. Writers John Wagner and Alan Grant stuff into these tales as many jokes about corpulence as they can, while the various artists provide some of the most comical and bizarre images you will see in a comic. The most memorable is the Ezquerra’s two-page spread picture of the corpse of a heavyweight victim of an appetite stimulant whose cause of death is ‘bedstead lodged in the abdomen’.

                To present such a situation on a TV programme without losing the comical tone of the original would be an achievement but one factor in the series’ favour is the changing expectations of TV viewers. A product of a culture that was deeply sceptical of authority figures and morbidly fascinated by American excess, Judge Dredd in its comic strip form never took off in the U.S. but in the last twenty years, thanks to morally complex shows such as The Sopranos, Mad Men and The Wire, audiences have become accustomed to watching antiheroes and stories laced with cynicism.  If ever the time was right for a Dredd series that was true to the anarchic spirit of the original strip, this is it.