Fox Developing a ‘Modern-Day Wild West’ Drama Series
These days networks are wasting no time looking back to the past for shows to revive and reboot, but Fox is looking back at a specific genre to bring back – the Western. According to TVLine, the network is developing a new one-hour police procedural, titled Deputy, that’s set in the ‘modern Wild West’ of Los Angeles.” Yee-haw!
The official logline reveals that Deputy will follow “a career lawman named Bill who’s very comfortable kicking down doors and being utterly lost in a staff meeting. But when the L.A. County Sheriff drops dead, Bill becomes acting sheriff of Los Angeles County, in charge of 10,000 sworn deputies policing a modern Wild West.” Fox has only ordered a script commitment for Deputy, but with Castle’s Will Beall at the helm of the drama, we don’t see any way it doesn’t make it to series.
Beall will also serve as an executive producer alongside Suicide Squad scribe David Ayer and The Americans’ Chris Long.
Should Deputy be picked up to series it would join Fox’s mixed bag of genre dramas including The Resident, Empire, Gotham, 9-1-1, and Lethal Weapon. The network also recently ordered to series an animated comedy voice-starring Kristen Bell and Maya Rudolph called Bless the Harts for the 2019-2020 season. The series is set to follow “a group of Southerners who are always broke as a joke, and struggling for the American dream of status and wealth. What they don’t realize is that they’re already rich, in friends, family and laughter.”
Also joining the 2019 lineup at Fox is the long-awaited adaption of Justin Cronin’s book trilogy The Passage. The series is described as “an epic, character-driven thriller about a secret government medical facility experimenting with a dangerous virus that could either cure all disease or cause the downfall of the human race.” It stars Saved by the Bell and Franklin & Bash’s Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Saniyya Sidney, Vincent Piazza, Brianne Howey, Jamie McShane, Caroline Chikezie, and Emmanuelle Chriqui.
What do you think of Deputy? We think that a modern-day Western sounds just creative enough to work!
Having studied Media & Writing at James Madison University, I always knew that I wanted to do some type of creative writing, but being able to write about zombies, Starks, and superheroes on a daily basis for Fan Fest is my actual dream. While I probably shouldn’t be as proud as I am to be so similar to Nick Miller, I do hope to one day write my own “Pepperwood Chronicles’.
