ABC had the Muppets and two Marvel series on during primetime last season, so I asked Channing Dungey, ABC’s new entertainment president, if she intended to develop a “Star Wars” series during her tenure at the network.
“As a fan, I would absolutely love to say yes,” she responded during ABC's Thursday morning executive Q&A at the Television Critics Association summer tour. “We have had conversations, and we will continue to have conversations with Lucasfilm. It would be wonderful to extend the franchise.”
When a subsequent question was asked about developing more Marvel properties for ABC, her response had a more specific timetable, allowing that she’d be meeting with Marvel execs in two weeks.
"We don't have an official timeline yet," Dungey said of ABC's Star Wars efforts, within seconds of removing her microphone.
Of course ABC’s sister channel Disney XD has a third season of the animated “Star Wars: Rebels” due out this autumn. “Rebels” was created by Simon Kinberg, whose screenwriting credits include “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” the "xXx" sequel starring Ice Cube, “X-Men: The Last Stand,” “Jumper,” “Sherlock Holmes,” “This Means War,” “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” last year’s “Fantastic Four” and this year’s “X-Men: Apocalypse.”
Before selling Lucasfilm to ABC’s parent company in 2012, George Lucas hired a writing team that included “Battlestar Galactica” mastermind Ronald D. Moore. That team wrote 50(!) hourlong episodes of a live-action “Star Wars” series. Upon completion of the Lucasfilm acquisition, ABC execs reportedly read the scripts but elected not to use them as the basis of a new series (although one character from that unmade live-action TV series – a Clone Wars veteran named Saw Gerrera – was repurposed for both DXD’s “Clone Wars” and the upcoming big-screen effort “Rogue One”).
