Marvel's 'New Warriors' Comedy Series At Freeform Gets A Straight-To-Series Order

So far Marvel Television has kept their small screen endeavors limited to shows like Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter on ABC and the round-up of street-level superhero shows that are leading up to an assembly of The Defenders on Netflix (which we just learned will be debuting this August). But Marvel's new Cloak and Dagger series is heading to Freeform, and another Marvel series won't be far behind on the same channel.

New Warriors is a Marvel Comics series that follows a group of young superheroes who are like the junior varsity version of The Avengers, not unlike what the New Mutants are to the X-Men. However, the TV series, which we first heard about last year, will star a character who has only ever been in the cartoon version of the team in The Ultimate Spider-Man animated series (seen above), and that's Squirrel Girl.

Find out more about the New Warriors TV series after the jump.

The Hollywood Reporter reveals that Freeform won a competitive bidding war with other cable and streaming services to land the New Warriors TV series by giving it a straight-to-series order of 10 episodes. The series will be Marvel's first live-action, half-hour comedy series, following in the footsteps of NBC's DC Comics comedy series Powerless.

Here's how the series is described in the official press release, which sounds like The Real World: Marvel Edition:

Marvel's New Warriors is about six young people with powers living and working together. With powers and abilities on the opposite end of the spectrum of The Avengers, the New Warriors want to make a difference in the world ... even if the world isn't ready. Not quite super, not yet heroes, Marvel's New Warriors is about that time in your life when you first enter adulthood and feel like you can do everything and nothing at once – except in this world, bad guys can be as terrifying as bad dates.

The series will feature fan-favorite Squirrel Girl (aka Doreen Green) as a totally empowering fan girl—tough, optimistic and a natural leader. Doreen is confident and has the powers of a squirrel. She's acrobatic, can fight and talk to other squirrels. Her most important trait is that she has faith in people and teaches them to believe in themselves.

Besides Squrrel Girl, we don't know which other members of the New Warriors the show will feature. Possibilities from the comics include Scarlet Spider, Speedball, Nova, Hummingbird, and Justice, but since Squirrel Girl wasn't even in the comic version of New Warriors, we could get a different team altogether.

While I'm not sure that turning New Warriors into a half-hour comedy series is the best approach, especially in the eyes of fans who love these characters from Marvel Comics, I think there's an exciting prospect about doing a Marvel series with a completely  different tone from the rest of the Marvel universe. Seeing a coming of age story about a bunch of teens with super powers set in the world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe could be really entertaining.

Kevin Biegel, the creator of Cougar Town and the underrated comedy series Enlisted, will write the New Warriors script and serve as showrunner on the comedy. Also encouraging are his writing credits on the series Scrubs, further showing that he knows how to handle an ensemble. The series is also co-produced by Marvel Television and ABC Signature Studios while Marvel's Jeph Loeb and Jim Chory (both of The Punisher and The Defenders) will serve as executive producers on the series.

The plan is for New Warriors to launch in 2018, presumably around the same time that Freeform will bring Cloak and Dagger to air, sometime in the winter. Could Freeform bring some worthy additions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe? We hope so.