Ilene Chaiken's CBS Pilot 'Quean' Scrapped for Being too Similar to 'Dragon Tattoo'

The L Wordcreator Ilene Chaiken’s most recent project, the CBS pilot Quean, about a female hacker, has been axed after it was embroiled in a copyright tug-of-war for bearing too close a resemblance to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo franchise, according to Deadline.

The pilot, a procedural, was originally set to “center on an edgy and independent Millennial hacker girl who teams up with an Oakland police detective to solve crimes,” Deadline reports. And while the plot does hew very closely to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, it also sounds a heck of a lot like out actress Kirsten Vangsness’ character Penelope Garcia on Criminal Minds.

Still, Warner Bros TV, which was slated to produce the pilot, received a letter from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo rights holder Sony threatening a lawsuit over “alleged similarities” to the franchise.

In an attempt to save the Quean project Chaiken went back to the drawing board and rewrote the pilot changing the hacker’s employer from a private investigator to a law firm – although, if Chaiken were trying to avoid similarities with anything existing in pop culture that character does sound dangerously close to bisexual investigator extraordinaire Kalinda on The Good Wife.

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To further distance the Quean’s main character from Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander, Chaiken made her less of a loner and gave her a boyfriend. Deadline reports that CBS was happy with the rewrites but when the script was sent to an outside law firm retained for the case it recommended scrapping the project altogether based on the sole fact that the character was a hacker. Note to all writers – Sony owns the rights to all female hackers from now until the end of time. 

Warner Bros axed the project altogether on Monday. Chaiken still has her hands in the Showtime’s The Real L Word pie however. 

Image via Getty.

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