Warning! Spoilers ahead for Chew!
The spiritual successor to Psych is a detective comedy mixed with a conspiracy thriller, one that is full of cannibals, cyborgs, and more. Chew is a cutting-edge, over-the-top comic book masterpiece, but after an early adaptation attempt fell through, it is now more than a decade overdue to be brought to the screen.
Chew was written by John Layman, with art by Rob Guillory. The series ran for 60 issues between 2009 and 2016.
The book is a dark comedy centered around Tony Chu, a Philly police detective with unusual powers trying to keep it together in a world that is increasingly getting out of control.
“Chew” Is The Cannibal Detective Dramedy TV Fans Didn’t Realize They’ve Been Waiting For
Chew #1, Written By John Layman; Art By Rob Guillory; Published In 2009 By Image Comics
Chew protagonist Tony Chu is a “cibopath,” giving him the unique ability to learn the entire history of anything he eats. As Chew #1 explains:
He can take a bite of an apple, and get a feeling in his head about what tree it grew from, what pesticides were used on the crop, and when it was harvested.
The downside? If he eats a hamburger, he knows exactly how the cow was slaughtered. The gruesomely logical extension of this? If he eats human flesh, he can learn the person’s whole personal history.
The remarkable thing is, Chew doesn’t waste any time building to that extreme point. It goes there in the first issue, and keeps getting more outrageous from there. It’s impossible to predict Chew’s many creative curveballs while reading it. The complete sixty-issue series is boundary-pushing and genre-bending comic storytelling at its finest.
And it would be totally fine if a TV series threw out the road map and started from scratch with the series core premise. A cop who can solve cases by eating food. Chew goes to some dark places. A TV show could go even darker. But it could also go lighter, leaning into a more procedural vibe, akin to Psych.
The Unpredictable Chaos Of “Chew” Might Not Make It To TV, But The Series’ Premise Is Too Great To Ignore
Chew #60 Written By John Layman; Art By Rob Guillory; Published In 2016 By Image Comics
A faithful Chew adaptation would be unlike anything else on television. Over time, the world of the series expands to include cyborgs, vampires, extraterrestrials, and more characters with food-based powers. As much as it is a detective series at heart, Chew is also a low-key novel take on the superhero genre.
Still, for all the wild swings the book takes, at its heart is a brilliantly simple premise: the detective who tastes leads. This premise could lead in a dozen different creative directions. Author John Layman, and artist Rob Guillory took the series in a direction no one else could have possibly conceived of. A TV showrunner might take it in another direction.
A Chew TV series could be a procedural. A straight-up comedy closer to Psych. A conspiracy drama. A cannibal horror series. Or, like the comic source material, it could try to juggle all of these genre chainsaws. In any case, Chew should be on TV fans’ radar as a mesmerizing adaptation waiting to happen.
- Release Date
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2006 – 2014-00-00
- Network
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USA
- Showrunner
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Steve Franks
