Trouble on DC TV?: 'Powerless' Loses Its Showrunner

The creative force at the head of NBC's upcoming comedy series Powerless has left his job, leaving a hole in one of the DC Comics universe's TV properties. While the development is reportedly not threatening the future of the show, it is one more hiccup in the quest to make a cross-platform, coherent extended universe from DC's characters.

Showrunner Ben Queen walked away from Powerless this week, leaving producers in search of a new creative chief for the series. Powerless stars Vanessa Hudgens as a young insurance adjuster whose specialty is taking care of ordinary citizens whose lives are impacted by the destructive activities of superheroes and villains. The series is a comedy, the first of its kind in the DC universe.

NBC says that Queen's departure won't disrupt its plans for Powerless even though production on the series will delayed until a new showrunner can be found. Powerless is slated to debut on the network during the midseason, and no definite premiere date had yet been announced.

Powerless will be the first DC series on NBC, but DC series on other networks have already run into some rough patches. Supergirl was not a strong ratings performer last season on CBS, despite good critical response and an enthusiastic fan base, and the freshman series faced possible cancellation at the end of its first season. Instead, CBS shifted the series to its sister network The CW, where DC series Arrow and The Flash had already been able to find respectable audiences.

The CW DC series have not been without controversy of their own, however. In June, actress Willa Holland, who plays Thea Queen on Arrow, caused an uproar when she claimed that her series was being limited in its creative options because DC didn't want cross overs between the CW series and its theatrical films. Holland said that plans to incorporate storylines on her series that included characters from Suicide Squad were scrapped as Warner Bros. developed its own plans for a Suicide Squad movie.

And then there's the Justice League movie, which will feature The Flash. Although the character is well-established as the lead in his own series on CW, Warner Bros. opted to cast another actor, Ezra Miller, in the theatrical version of the role instead of Grant Gustin, who plays the TV version of The Flash. The decision to keep the film and TV versions of the DC universe separate has some fans scratching their heads, especially since the creative bosses at Marvel Studios are making a concerted effort to weave a complex web of connections between that universe's properties on TV, film and online streaming services.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the DCEU, though, is its inability, at least so far, to establish a film tentpole that will serve as a foundation for all the other properties, a la Marvel's The Avengers. The first shot at such a tentpole was Warner Bros.' Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but that film, although an impressive performer by some measures, turned out to be a disappointment in terms of critical and fan reception, as well as overall financial performance.

This month's Suicide Squad looked as if it could be a second chance to finally turn in a big DC hit, but it debuted to a cool reception much like that received by Batman v Superman.

Hope for the future of the DC universe now rests squarley on the shoulders of Justice League Part One, which is scheduled for release in November 2017. That film is most directly comparable to The Avengers and could, at last, deliver the universe-defining property that fans have been waiting for.