CSI Baltimore: ABC Buys Edgar Allan Poe Detective Pilot

As "Pulp Fiction's" Jules Winnfield explained, "Some pilots get picked up and become television programs. Some don't - become nothing." So, you know, take the news with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Still...we can't resist the idea that ABC has, according to The Hollywood Reporter, purchased a pilot for a detective series starring Edgar Allan Poe. The show - fiction, obviously - imagines that in between writing "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe was skulking around 1840s Boston solving mysteries.

Oddly enough, this isn't the only historically-revisionist take on Poe being planned. John Cusack is currently hard at work on "The Raven," a feature film that puts Poe on the trail of a serial killer who kills people in ways eerily similar to methods described in the author's stories. "The Silence of the Ourang-Outangs" then? 

Poe, of course, is credited with creating the detective novel as we know it."Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget" - both starring his detective character C. Auguste Dupin - laid the groundwork for other great literary sleuths like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Batman.

Our only hope is that ABC goes hog wild with the proposed Poe series. Slap together a nice, slick "CSI: Miami" style opening ("Looks like someone's letter....[sunglasses on]....has been purloined. YEEEEEEEAAAAH!) and give Poe a wise-cracking raven sidekick ("Bwak! Don't trust her, Eddie! Bwak!) and we are 100% on board.

Now excuse us, we have to pitch a series about Herman Melville opening a "Deadliest Catch" -style fishing business...

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