After delighting ’50s teenagers all over the world with the summer nights and hand jives of Fox’s Grease Live, Vanessa Hudgens is moving on to a role that will hopefully be more interesting than it sounds. According to Variety, she’ll be starring in the pilot for NBC’s Powerless, a workplace comedy set in the DC Comics universe that primarily revolves around people who have no powers whatsoever (in the normal human way, not the Batman way). Hudgens will be an insurance claims adjuster named Emily Locke who “loves her job” and “likes to fly under the radar” so she can “just get her work done,” none of which are the sort of things you usually expect to see in a superhero show, even one that’s as tangentially related to superheroes as this one. (Unless you take “likes to fly under the radar” literally, of course.)
Presumably, the superhero world will intersect with Locke’s pretty often, due to the realities of being an insurance adjuster in a universe where entire cities are regularly destroyed, miniaturized, and hurled into alternate realities. Who knows? Maybe she’ll have to deal with a Bizarro doppelgänger at some point, or maybe one of her co-workers will start dating some DC Comics D-lister like Matter-Eater Lad or Aquaman.
The Powerless pilot was written by A To Z creator Ben Queen and will be directed by former The State member Michael Patrick Jann.