Diablo Cody’s New Show Puts Female Protagonist Front and Center

Diablo Cody will be taking her talent of creating complex female protagonists to television — Fox, the surprising new home for relatively smart network TV, has put into production a series called Prodigy, written by Cody and produced Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage’s (that’s The O.C. producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage to you) Fake Empire.

Here’s a synopsis from Deadline:

It centers on a 16-year-old genius who through home schooling has been isolated from her peers. Hoping to experience a “normal” teen social life before she enters the adult world of academia, she enrolls in her local high school. But her experiment goes off the rails when she finds herself adopted by a wild crowd, getting caught up in a whirlwind of romance and crime.

So, this is basically Doogie Howser if, instead of going directly into the medical profession, Doogie wanted to “relate” to kids his own age by matriculating into grade school, and, once in grade school, he and his new friends, while blitzed on meth, accidentally killed another kid and had to hide the body in a cubby at school, the last place anyone would look. I hope I’m not misreading this, because if this analogy is correct, Prodigy sounds awesome.