Just a little over seven years after making its debut at Vertigo, Jason Aaron and R.M. Guerra’s Scalped is coming to television, according to The Hollywood Reporter. WGN America (Salem) is adapting the series under Banshee showrunner Doug Jung, the report indicates.
The series would bring the story of unreformed badass Dashiell Bad Horse, who returns to his home on the fictional Prairie Rose Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home to the Oglala Lakota people. What the reservation (and Lincoln Red Crow, the crime boss and killer who runs it) doesn’t know is that Bad Horse is an undercover FBI agent, looking to solve a decades-old murder which could point to corruption in his own organization.
The dark – sometimes grim/messed up/wrenching – series ran for 60 issues at Vertigo before ending its run in 2012. As much as the book is about Dash’s undercover investigation, it’s also about the continuing struggles of native people to maintain their culture and identity, living in a nation that seems to have abandoned them to crime, drug, and poverty-ridden reservations depicted in the book. Its twelve arcs – shifting between the present and the American Indian Movement of the ’70s – would make five very, very solid years of TV programming, if WGN plays its cards right.
At this point, the only thing left for fans to do is start aggressively fan-casting the series.
How about they cast some NATIVE ACTORS this time? I mean Rooney Mara and Johnny Depp may be busy after all.