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Michael Chabon to Fight Nazis With Magic for HBO

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Novelist Michael Chabon is developing a series for HBO, titled Hobgoblin, about magicians fighting Nazis in WWII.

Now keep in mind that the project—on which Chabon is teaming with wife Ayelet Waldman—is in an early, pre-pilot stage of development. So as with all such embryonic projects (Aaron Sorkin’s cable-news show for HBO, or the Hollywood-gossip series based on Nikki Finke that the network recently passed on) we must note that it may never happen.

Still, we’re talking Michael Chabon and Nazi-fighting and magic and HBO. That’s pretty much every awesome thing on the planet in one sentence, except tacos. And I cannot say with certainty that there will not be tacos.

The nascent project, by the way, is the latest in what seems to be a boomlet of fantasy- and magic-related TV series, including HBO’s Game of Thrones, Starz’s Camelot (also debuting next month) and Ron Moore’s magic cop-show pilot for NBC. As TV trends go, I approve of this one, especially if even a fraction of them are well-executed; there’s enough intelligent fantasy in the literary world that I can’t understand why it hasn’t done better on TV (beyond the campy Xena / Legend of the Seeker genre).

This guy might disagree, however (somewhat NSFW):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnYoyCgFKSI]