Spike UK has snapped up the UK rights to Syfy’s drama series Wynonna Earp after striking a deal with international distributor Dynamic Television, TVWise has learned. The show’s first season is expected to premiere on the channel later this month.
Wynonna Earp follows the great, great granddaughter of Wyatt Earp. After a troubled adolescence, Wynonna has inherited Wyatt’s mythic abilities, his famous gun and his old enemies: demons. Now, as a special agent in the Black Badge Division, a division of the U.S. Marshals Service, Wynonna is determined to find out what really happened to her sister Willa, who disapperaed many years ago, and put an end to the Earp curse once and for all.
The hour-long series hails from Emily Andras, who developed it for television and serves as showrunner; Canadian production company Seven24 Films; and IDW Publishing. The cast includes Melanie Scrofano (Gangland), Tim Rozon (Being Human), Shamier Anderson (Defiance) and Dominique Provost-Chalkley (Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron). Jordy Randall and Tom Cox also serve as executive producers alongside Emily Andras.
Since their launch in 2015, Spike UK has been steadily increasing their footprint when it comes to first run U.S. and Canadian scripted acquisitions. The channel previously snapped up UK rights to such series as Justified, Sons Of Anarchy, 19-2, Transporter: The Series and Powers – the scripted drama that was developed and produced for Sony’s Playstation Network.
While a number of those shows have something of a male-skew, acquisitions executive Marie-Claire Dunlop previously told TVWise that they are a “co-viewing channel” and as such are careful not to “alienate a female audience”. Wynonna Earp, with a strong female lead, certainly fits into that mandate. “We can be high-octane, but we’ve just got to be mindful that at the same time we are a broader, more eclectic entertainment channel”, she added. “It is about those broad pieces. We don’t want niche propositions, they’ve got to be populist and mainstream”.
