The world of television, especially in recent years, has been attracting more and more big-screen talent, and, according to Variety, Joel and Ethan Coen are the latest in a long line of directors to make the jump to television. Variety reports that the Coen brothers have partnered with Annapurna Television in order to develop a new series set in the Old West which goes by the name of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. A Western TV series from the Coen brothers? Yes please!
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs will be a limited anthology series which Joel and Ethan Coen will write, direct and produce. As usual, there's very little information about what their first-ever TV series will be about, but it's said that the show will "intertwine six different story lines." Variety also reports that Annapurna "intends to pursue an innovative approach that could combine television and theatrical." It's not yet known exactly what they mean by that, but Variety's sources say that the scope of the project was deemed to be too challenging to be covered in a single feature film. They also added that Annapurna's approach may be similar to the one which Ron Howard envisioned for the THE DARK TOWER series, a feature-film followed by a companion TV series. Either way, we're getting more Western goodness from the pair who brought us TRUE GRIT and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, I call that a big win. The show hasn't been set up at a network just yet, but I'd imagine that almost all of them would love the chance to work with the Coens.
Aside from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers' upcoming projects include lending their scripting talents to George Clooney's SUBURBICON as well as DARK WEB, a cyber/thriller centered around "29-year-old idealist named Ross William Ulbricht (aka Dread Pirate Roberts) who built an online illegal-drug marketplace called "The Silk Road" and along the way allegedly became a murderous kingpin."