The Coen brothers make first foray into TV with… | Little White Lies

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The Coen broth­ers make first for­ay into TV with The Bal­lad of Buster Scruggs

11 Jan 2017

Words by Lena Hanafy

Three men, one wearing a T-shirt with a graphic design, standing together.
Three men, one wearing a T-shirt with a graphic design, standing together.
Their ambi­tious new project is being described as a ​‘west­ern anthology’.

Joel and Ethan Coen are join­ing the likes of David O Rus­sell, Steven Soder­bergh and Guiller­mo del Toro in turn­ing their hand(s) to the small screen. The revered film­mak­ing duo are set to cre­ate a west­ern mini-series enti­tled The Bal­lad of Buster Scrug­gs for Annapurna’s new TV arm.

Orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived as a film but per­ceived too chal­leng­ing to con­dense into a sin­gle fea­ture-length sto­ry, the premise report­ed­ly con­cerns six dif­fer­ent inter­twin­ing sto­ry lines. There’s been no announce­ment yet as to when the series will air, but Anna­pur­na have con­firmed their inten­tions to com­bine a tele­vi­sion and the­atri­cal release.

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The Coens are of course well-versed in the themes and visu­al lan­guage of the west­ern genre, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten and direct­ed No Coun­try for Old Men and True Grit, and with the back­ing of Anna­pur­na (Zero Dark Thir­ty, The Mas­ter) the prospect of an orig­i­nal anthol­o­gy series from the broth­ers is very excit­ing indeed.

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