MTV Just Signed Up for a "War of the Worlds" TV Series

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand.

Take a guess how old H.G. Wells' classic sci-fi novel War of the Worlds is. Seventy years old? Ninety? A hundred? Nope, it's one hundred and nineteen years old. That's some pretty deep digging, especially for MTV. Either way, a War of the Worlds TV series has officially been picked up by MTV , to be written by Andrew Cochran (who worked on Teen Wolf) and produced by Jeff David, Josh Barry, and Jeff Kwatinetz (you might recognize the last two names from The Firm).No release date has been set for the series, and no lead actors have been announced so far. What do we know? Well, for one, it's the passion project of the aforementioned producer Josh Barry, whose grandpa, Gene Barry, starred in the 1953 film version of the War of the Worlds. We know that the series is set in contemporary times, and that Steven Spielberg's 2005 film version was all right. If MTV decides not to go the big-budget special-effects route, they may focus more on the paranoia aspect of the whole alien invasion, like Colony.Either way, be prepared for a lot of these guys:These are the Martian "fighting machines," often called "tripods" by fans. Here's the original passage from H.G. Wells' novel, when the narrator first sees them:It's important to note that the original novel took place when milking stools (and horse-drawn carts) were still relatively common. These days, we have nuclear weapons, F-22 fighter jets, and EMP weapons. If the iconic tripods are going to be the vanguards of a Martian invasion, they had better be packing some Age of Ultron-level tech.As for the survivors of the attack, who knows? Maybe this will be a show about normal people staying alive in the midst of an alien attack, sort of like a sci-fi Cloverfield. Maybe it'll be sort of like Independence Day, where we follow the small team of people who are planning a counterattack (it is a war, after all). We'll keep you updated as thing develop!