Doom Patrol Spinoff Recasting Its Two Main Characters
The Doom Patrol spinoff just got a big time update with Dead Boy Detectives deciding to recast its three leads for the upcoming series.
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Doom Patrol has been a rather unlikely success story for HBO Max, coming out of the pages of DC Comics but not typically known among even some hardcore fans. The characters are of a different superhero variety, playing on some oddball themes and tugging on emotional aspects of the characters that we typically don’t get in these kinds of programs. And from this show, we are going to get a Doom Patrol spinoff, taken from another comic book series around characters briefly introduced during the last season. But it looks like the new show Dead Boy Detectives will make some changes from what we saw when they were introduced, namely the parts of the leads are going to be recast.
According to Variety (via ScreenRant), Dead Boy Detectives is getting a series order through HBO Max, acting as something of a Doom Patrol spinoff. The Dead Boy Detectives were created by Neil Gaiman when they were introduced in the Sandman series he publishes through the Vertigo house, a subsidiary of DC Comics. The story follows two boys, Charles Rowland and Edward Paine who, like the title suggests, are very much dead. But rather than joining the rest of their deceased brethren in the afterlife, they are sticking around Earth helping to solve a variety of happenings that involved the living and the supernatural.
Dead Boy Detectives becomes a Doom Patrol spinoff because we met the characters of Charles and Edward in Season 3’s episode “Dead Patrol”. The two boys along with Crystal Palace who acts as their medium, connecting the pair via a communication outlet, helped return the Doom Patrol squad from the dead. The difference in this spinoff show will be the casting. In Doom Patrol, we got Sebastian Croft, Ty Tennant, and Madalyn Horcher as the trio. The new Dead Boy Detectives series will bring in new talent. Jayden Revri will play Edwin Payne, George Rexstrew is Charles Rowland, and Kassius Nelson will take on the part of Crystal Palace in the Doom Patrol spinoff.
From the Variety reporting, it isn’t quite clear why Dead Boy Detective decided to recast the leads for the Doom Patrol spinoff. There are a number of reasons something like that could go down, but it would stand to reason that there might be a lack of total connectivity between the two series when it is all said and done. While they are both DC properties, it need not be that they for sure exist in the same universe here. That being said, the creatives behind the show like Greg Berlanti and Jeremy Carver are producers for both series, so it is a bit odd to completely pivot the faces in the leads. Steven Yockey is on to direct the Doom Patrol spinoff pilot and act as showrunner.
For a group of rather unknown characters, Doom Patrol has been a critical hit for HBO Max. The series is averaging 98% on Rotten Tomatoes through its first three seasons. The third season just wrapped up a couple of weeks ago with the Season 3 finale “Amends Patrol” airing on the streamer. Prior to that it had already been announced that a fourth season would be coming down the pike. And now with this Doom Patrol spinoff, we are sure to get more stories in an unlikely world.
