It’s been over a year since we first heard that Fuzzy Door, Seth MacFarlane’s production company, had picked up the rights to adapt Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl books. Today, we found out via Variety that the project is moving into development as a live-action television series at Peacock.
That’s right, we’re getting closer to seeing Carl and Prince Donut’s televised apocalyptic journey… on television.
Here’s the official logline for the project, which hews closely to the first book:
An alien invasion has wiped out most of humanity and any survivors are forced to fight for their lives on a sadistic intergalactic game show. Sounds bad, right? Now try doing it with bare feet and a stuck-up, self-centered, tiara-wearing talking cat as your partner. Welcome to Dungeon Crawler World: Earth, where the apocalypse will be televised… and Coast Guard vet Carl finds himself stuck with his ex-girlfriend’s award-winning show cat, Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk, as they try to survive the end of the world, fighting monsters, aliens, an insane A.I. and even other survivors… all for the sake of good TV. Survival is optional. Entertainment is not.
Dinniman and MacFarlane will serve as executive producers on the project, with Chris Yost (Thor: Ragnarok, The Mandalorian, Cowboy Bebop) also on board as writer and executive producer. The project is still in its early days, so there’s no news on casting for Carl and/or Princess Donut. Dinniman did say in a previous interview with Variety, however, that he was confident in how the show’s fantastical elements would look in live action.
“We’re not going to do it if it’s gonna look like absolute shit,” he said. “And they will do CGI testing on Princess Donut and stuff like that. And that’s all I can say, I think. It’s all gonna hinge on what it looks like. But Fuzzy Door, specifically, if you watch Ted or The Orville, you’ll see that they know what they’re doing when it comes to this. So I would say, don’t knock it till you try it.”
