Sony To CBS: We'll Sue You For Having A Lady Hacker Show

A hacker, hacking.

Television's fairly littered with shows that have been, to put it mildly, "inspired" by other pieces of media. It seems like as soon as you debut your show about hard-nosed proprietors of a pawn shop or people who buy up storage units in the hopes of finding buried treasure, there'll be half a dozen copycat shows on rival networks. That's true of network shows, of course, with series like The Mentalist and Lie To Me coming from eerily similar origins, but for the most part everyone involved in television production treats the situation as the price of doing business: if someone cares enough to copy your concept, you must be doing something right.

Sony Pictures, on the other hand, apparently thinks that CBS went a bridge too far in their work on the pilot for Quean, a new hacker/detective show from the creator of Showtime's The L Word, Ilene Chaiken. Quean was originally intended to be a fairly straightforward knock-off of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a film series that Sony owns the rights to, featuring a young, loner, female hacker who works for a private detection agency and who teams up with a police detective to solve crimes in Oakland. Presumably she'd also have some kind of overgrown lizard tattoo, as well.

All's well that ends well, theoretically, but when Sony got word of Quean, they responded with the fairly-rare threat of a lawsuit over the show's very concept (the pilot has not been shot and the lead character hasn't even been casted yet). According to Deadline, this caused CBS to ask Chaiken to rewrite the pilot, changing the lead character's boss to be a black female lawyer instead of a white male P.I., giving her a boyfriend, and so on and so forth. CBS reportedly liked the changes, but an external law firm still recommended they not go forward with the pilot since the lead character was still a hacker. As such, CBS has apparently decided not to fund the pilot, which theoretically might move to another network.

So, apparently Sony believes it owns the rights to any form of media that features a lady hacker. CBS is probably just exercising an extreme amount of caution over this threat of legal action; it'd be hard to believe that Sony would convince a jury that their property was really suffering much damage from the existence of another show that featured a girl who was good with a computer, but given their willingness to try, CBS might wind up spending a bunch of money just to reach the same conclusion that they did today, and still be out of a show. CBS likely also licenses some shows that Sony produces, and presumably that business relationship might be worth scuttling a promising idea or two if they're likely to get upset over them. The Deadline article presumes that Sony might be attempting to create a Dragon Tattoo show down the road and wants to preempt any competition, which sounds like a plausible assumption.