BLADE:
THE SERIES.

SPIKE TV’S FIRST SCRIPTED SERIES

THE SHOW THAT GAVE A MUSIC-VIDEO CHANNEL ITS FIRST DRAMA

In February 2006, Spike TV (the network dropped “TV” from its branding that May, becoming simply Spike a few weeks before this show premiered) greenlit a television series based on Marvel’s vampire hunter, its first original scripted drama since relaunching from TNN in 2003. New Line Television produced it in association with Marvel, with Geoff Johns among the executive producers alongside David Simkins. The network ordered eleven one-hour episodes on top of a two-hour pilot already in the works, a season that ultimately aired as thirteen broadcast hours once the pilot was split into two parts for its premiere week.

David S. Goyer, who had written all three Blade films and would go on to direct Blade: Trinity, is the credited creator of the series and co-wrote the pilot with comics writer Geoff Johns. Goyer’s name is the one most associated with Blade on screen, but his credited role on this particular show was creator and pilot writer, working alongside a separate production team on the season’s day-to-day episodes.

A RAPPER IN THE ROLE WESLEY SNIPES BUILT

WHY A MEMBER OF ONYX REPLACED HOLLYWOOD’S BLADE

Kirk Jones, better known as Sticky Fingaz, frontman of the hardcore rap group Onyx, took over the title role from Wesley Snipes. He had already built a screen career, including a recurring role on FX’s The Shield, and producers wanted someone who could carry both halves of the part. “It can’t be a guy that knows how to fight but can’t act and it can’t be a guy that can act but can’t fight,” Jones said of what the role demanded, telling interviewers he performed close to 95 percent of his own stunts: “I do at least 95% of my stunts. The guys are mad at me.”

Jones addressed the recast directly rather than sidestep it, comparing it to an actor taking over an existing role. “We’re not taking away anything that the audience knows from it; we’re just adding to it,” he said. That framing, adding to the same franchise rather than starting over, is closer to how the show and its star described it at the time than a clean break from the films would suggest, even though Snipes never appears and no film cast member carries over into the series.

A DIFFERENT CITY, A DIFFERENT KIND OF VAMPIRE

HOW THE SHOW REWORKED BLADE’S WORLD FOR A WEEKLY RUNTIME

Rather than continue any specific film plot thread, the series is built around Krista Starr (Jill Wagner), a soldier who returns from Iraq to find her twin brother dead and learns he had been serving as a “familiar” to a vampire in hope of eventually being turned himself. Her search for the vampire responsible, Marcus Van Sciver (Neil Jackson), a senior member of the “House of Chthon,” is what brings her into Blade’s orbit. After Van Sciver turns her, Blade offers her the same serum he uses to control his own hunger so she can work undercover against the vampire aristocracy from the inside. It is set in Detroit, and reworks vampire feeding into an injected serum rather than a bite.

Reviewers at the time noted the show ran cooler than the R-rated films it borrowed its name from. Variety’s Brian Lowry credited Jones with “a fair Wesley Snipes impersonation” while faulting the season for noise over substance. The two-hour pilot also got its own standalone unrated DVD release that September, restoring material trimmed for the Spike broadcast, a small but real sign that the version airing on basic cable had been softened from what was actually shot.

CANCELLED WITH A CLIFFHANGER STILL OPEN

A RECORD PREMIERE, THEN A SEASON THAT COULDN’T PAY FOR ITSELF

Blade: The Series opened on 28 June 2006 to 2.5 million viewers, the most-watched original series premiere in Spike’s history at that point, and finished the night as the top-rated cable show of the evening among men 18 to 34 and 18 to 49. Its two-hour pilot was also made available free on iTunes for a week after broadcast, with each new episode following it onto the platform the day after it aired, an unusually early digital release for basic-cable programming in 2006. The audience did not hold at the same level across the rest of the season, and Spike did not order a second one.

“The network didn’t want to cancel it, I just think Spike TV is still a young network, and the price it was costing to make… they just weren’t able to do it.”

Geoff Johns, executive producer, on the show’s cancellation

What makes the cancellation notable is that ratings alone do not appear to explain it. Johns’s account puts the actual cause down to cost rather than audience size, at a network he describes as not yet able to absorb what the show cost to make. The season ends on a cliffhanger a second season would have resolved, and never did.

THE REWATCH

AN EARLY, FORGOTTEN ENTRY IN MARVEL’S TELEVISION HISTORY

Review aggregates land the season in mixed territory rather than disaster territory: Rotten Tomatoes lists Blade: The Series at 50% from critics against a 50% audience score, with a consensus that it “emphasizes gore and techno music over dramatic development, making for a bland action series,” and Metacritic’s aggregate sits at 49.

Watched today, Blade: The Series reads less as a continuation of the Snipes trilogy and more as an early, largely overlooked entry in Marvel’s long run at television, years before Marvel Television built Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Netflix series into a sustained strategy. It shares a catalogue slot with the film trilogy on this site without sharing much of an audience with it: a single, self-contained, one-season stop for anyone tracking Marvel’s television output from the beginning, rather than a required companion to the films it borrowed its name from.