Amazon moves forward with Mass Effect TV show based on the BioWare hit

When news broke yesterday that Amazon MGM Studios was moving ahead with its long-dormant Mass Effect TV series, I had one wistful thought: Wow. I wonder what Mass Effect even is without Commander Shepard.

(If you’re running to the comments to say “BioWare did that, it was called Mass Effect: Andromeda!” Come on. Amazon is not going to make a show based on the most ill-received game in the franchise. Be real.)

But then, just as suddenly, I realized the fundamental flaw in my assumption. Oh god, I thought, Please don’t let them just make a show about Shepard.

See, the main character of the Mass Effect trilogy, though customizable, is still miles more specifically realized than, say, the leads of 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 down to a single depiction? While it would be very funny to have Shepard show up in a Mass Effect TV series the same way adults appear in Charlie Brown specials — just to the left of frame, and every time they speak they’re drowned out by a Reaper blast and you have to read a subtitle — I don’t know if it would make great television.

The thing is, Shepard aside, Mass Effect is a very rich setting, ripe for introduction to a new medium and a wider audience. The question isn’t whether someone should try to make a Mass Effect show. It’s whether Amazon Studios has the commitment. Because a half-assed Mass Effect is just a no-assed Star Trek. Or worse: Halo with Boinking.

You could make almost any kind of space opera show in Mass Effect’s Milky Way galaxy. Militarized space adventures with multispecies crew? You got it. Daring smugglers in a galactic underbelly? It’s here. Series mainstay Liara T’soni would make a great Charlie sort of character for a group of Star Wars-style scoundrels with hearts of gold. You could make a small-scope series about characters trying to get by on the Omega station, Mass Effect’s own “wretched hive of scum and villainy.” A space detective procedural set in the politics and bureaucracy of the Citadel. Pulp adventure hunting down ancient alien artifacts.

The question is, how nerdy are you willing to get, and how much money are you gonna spend to get there? With a few exceptions, Mass Effect does not have Star Trek-style, slap-a-couple-bits-of-latex-on-an-extra aliens. How hard will Amazon commit to the franchise where people (and I include myself, here) recognize the validity of this guy as a sex icon:

Are we going to reduce the universe to humans, Asari (a truly rich concept that’s extremely easy to reduce to “sexy space babes”), and only cameo appearances from all of Mass Effect’s half a dozen other alien races?

You gonna have hanar characters? Elcor? What is a Mass Effect story without the krogan (T. rex aliens), turians (grasshopper faces), or salarians (the platonic ideal of a Doug Jones character)?

Listen, if Amazon wants to hire Doug Jones and pulls down the Henson Creature Shop to make fully animatronic krogan and turian suits? If they want to do Farscape in Mass Effect? I’m here for it. Doug Jones would play the fuck out of a salarian. But do they?

If you were really strapped for 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 in time a generation from the main events of the trilogy and cover humanity’s first contact with a sentient alien species, a brief but deadly back-and-forth between human and turian space navies that broke out after a misunderstanding about the danger of accessing an ancient alien device, and that ended in humanity being welcomed into the wider galactic community.

It’s a story where you could get away with featuring not only fewer alien characters, but also fewer alien species. Come up with some compelling original characters as leads, and use it as an introduction to the wider 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 nail in order for even that story to still feel like Mass Effect. The franchise succeeded by remixing and reflecting and rebuilding other extremely well-known military space operas — Star Trek, Halo, Starcraft, Starship Troopers — synthesizing ideas and making them more than the sum of their parts. If you don’t nail that specific mix, it’s going to make any show look like microwaved leftovers. Not least because in the decade since the Mass Effect trilogy concluded, franchises like Star Trek have liberally and obviously borrowed (or accidentally recreated, however you want to assign that blame) some of its biggest twists.

Will Amazon have the fortitude to emphasize everything that distinguishes Mass Effect from the other titans in its genre? To adapt the strange galaxy that Mass Effect was able to realize precisely because it was not a live-action medium? Precisely because 50-plus-hour RPGs can go in on world-building and characters in a way eight-to-10-episode TV seasons can’t?

I suppose we’ll find out.