The Daily Bugle was built on the principles of truth, freedom of the press, and the public’s right to know. But in an age of crumbling journalism, declining sales, misinformation, disinformation, and fake news, can a publishing giant afford to cling to such outdated concepts?

THE BUGLE is a brightly sarcastic and darkly humorous series that operates as a tough-as-nails political drama exploring the many aspects of a news organization struggling to survive. And yet, in the spirit of the most ambitious journalism, the series itself acts as evocative cinematic essay. Digging well beneath the surface, the show finds a distinctively wry voice in deeper themes and various, sometimes conflicting, arguments on politics and power, truth and lies, good and evil, and even broader... the current state of the American Experiment.

If The Wire explored the “Experiment” in the early 2000s and found existential conclusions of an America at war with itself, here we root ourselves into the crumbling ecosystem of the Great American Newspaper to check back in on the Experiment of the mid-2020s. Set in a grit-true New York, and populated by an array of contemporary colorful characters each with their own truths and angles and idiosyncratic conundrums, we aim to ironically paint a definitively murky portrait of our nation’s current state of affairs.

Battles rage between those who systematically undermine journalism and those who weaponize it, with no clear way of knowing which is which. We’ll discover the dark depths to which power will resort to hang on to its control of the megaphone, and the desperate need for some semblance of Truth on the street level. Each and every layer of systematic conflict begs the question... who the hell can save us from this?

Developed at the request of Sony Pictures and Executive Producer Jon Watts, the series is centered around the Daily Bugle newspaper from the Spider-Man comics but is set in what we call the “Bugle-verse” – a pocket Universe of the Spider-Man Mythos. One of the infinite number of “Spider-verses”, each featuring a variation of the same players, each a thread building a web with a Spider-Man at its center.

But where this universe treads in dramatically uncharted territory, it does so thanks to the stark absence of Spider-Man. Because this is the one Spider-verse where Spider-Man is, literally, the stuff of comics. This is a world without superheroes. This is the real world. Our world. A world in dire need of a superhero.

But that is not to say this is a world without villains. Our own certainly isn’t. In fact, in order for villains to thrive in this world, good men need only do nothing. Just look at the headlines. Turn on the television. Powerful people are winning in so many disheartening ways, and it always comes at the expense of those with less. The time has come, then, in our world and this one, especially because superhuman strength and abilities are not possible, when heroes are sorely needed.

And it’s precisely the absence of Spider-Man that gives this haunting vision of our own reality its gripping tension. Its desperate reason to be. And only time will tell which of our various characters will step up and attempt to fill that Spider-Man-shaped void. Who will regret or revel in it? And who will exploit it for their own ends?

Developed for Sony Pictures.