When the news broke yesterday that Amazon was MGM Studios continues its long-dormant Mass Effect TV seriesI had a melancholy thought: Wow. I wonder what Mass Effect even is without Commander Shepard.
(If you run to the comments to say “BioWare did that, it got called Mass Effect: Andromeda!” Come on. Amazon does not is going to create a show based on the most poorly received game in the franchise. Be real.)
But then, just as suddenly, I realized the fundamental flaw in my assumption. Oh godI thought, Please don’t let them make a show just about Shepard.
See, the main character of the Mass Effect trilogy, while customizable, is still much more specifically realized than, say, the protagonists in the games that inspired Amazon’s latest video game hit: Fallout. Forget the Broshep-vs.-Femshep argument; How do you condense the multiple romance options and the Paragon/Renegade alignments into a single image? Although it would be really funny to see Shepard appear in a Mass Effect TV series the same way adults appear in Charlie Brown specials: just off to the left of the screen, and every time they say something they’re drowned out by a Reaper explosion and you have to read a subtitle – I don’t know if it would make great television.
The point is, Shepard aside, Mass Effect is a very rich setting, ripe for introduction to a new medium and a wider audience. The question is not whether anyone should try making a Mass Effect show. What matters is whether Amazon Studios is the stake. Because a half-hearted Mass Effect is just Star Trek without a doubt. Or worse: Halo with fucking.
You could make almost any kind of space opera show in Mass Effect’s galaxy. Militarized space adventures with a multi-species crew? You got it. Daring smugglers in a galactic underbelly? It’s here. Series mainstay Liara T’soni would be a great player Charlie kind of character for a group of Star Wars-style villains with a heart of gold. You could make a small-scale series about characters trying to make ends meet on Omega Station, Mass Effect’s own “miserable hive of scum and villainy.” A space detective procedural set in the politics and bureaucracy of the Citadel. Pulp adventure hunting for ancient alien artifacts.
The question is: how nerdy are you willing to get, and how much money are you going to spend to get there? With a few exceptions, Mass Effect doesn’t have a Star Trek-style, slap-a-few-bits-of-latex-on-an-extra-aliens feel. How hard will Amazon push for the franchise where people (including myself here) recognize this man’s validity as a sex icon:
Are we going to reduce the universe to humans, Asari (a really rich concept that is extremely easy to reduce to “sexy space babes”), and only cameo appearances from all six other alien races from Mass Effect?
You will have it hanar characters? Elcor? What’s a Mass Effect story without the krogan (T. rex aliens), turians (locust-faced) or salarians (the platonic ideal of a Doug Jones character)?
Listen, like Amazon want to to hire Doug Jones and take down the Henson Creature Shop to make fully animatronic krogan and turian suits? If they want to do that View in mass effect? I’m here for it. Doug Jones would be the fuck from a salary. But do they?
If you really don’t have a budget, the First Contact War/Relay 314 Incident is a great piece of Mass Effect canon to expand on as an introductory season. Go back a generation from the main events of the trilogy and chronicle humanity’s first contact with a sentient alien species, a brief but deadly back and forth between human and tourist spacecraft that broke out after a misunderstanding over the danger of entry an ancient alien device, and it led to humanity being welcomed into the wider galactic community.
It’s a story where you could get away with not only fewer alien characters, but fewer alien species. Create some compelling original characters as protagonists and use them as an introduction to the broader canon underpinnings of Mass Effect, for further exploration by curious humanity in later seasons.
But there would be so many other things you’d have to do to make even that story still feel like Mass Effect. The franchise succeeded by remixing, reflecting and rebuilding other extremely well-known military space operas – Star Trek, Halo, Starcraft, Starship Troopers – synthesizing ideas and making them greater than the sum of their parts. If you don’t get that specific mix right, every show will end up looking like leftovers in the microwave. Not least because franchises like Star Trek have done that in the ten years since the end of the Mass Effect trilogy generous And evidently borrowed (or accidentally recreated, however you want to assign that blame) some of the biggest twists.
Will Amazon have the power to highlight everything that sets Mass Effect apart from the other titans of its genre? To adapt the strange galaxy that Mass Effect managed to create exactly because it wasn’t a live-action medium? Precisely because 50+ hour RPGs can deal with world and character building in a way that eight to ten episode TV seasons can’t?
I guess we’ll find out.