There’s a trend for beloved movies being adapted into TV shows at the moment, with Lethal Weapon, Point Break, Rambo, Uncle Buck all making their way to the small screen. And now a somewhat unexpected entry joins their ranks: Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning crime drama The Departed is being developed into a television series for Amazon, according to The Wrap.
The 2006 film, itself adapted from the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs, starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson, and earned Scorsese his first, long-deserved Best Director Oscar. The twisty sprawling plot detailed an undercover cop (DiCaprio) infiltrating the Boston mafia, just as the mafia infiltrated the Boston police with one of its own (Damon).
The TV show looks to be a fairly loose adaptation of the film rather than a continuation, which should be no surprise given that – spoiler alert for a ten-year-old film – nobody really makes it out alive of the movie. The Boston setting will be transposed to Chicago, and it'll follow two moles on both sides of a Latino drug war.
Jason Richman – best known at this point for writing the screenplay to Bangkok Dangerous – will write and executive produce the show. Amazon Studios and Brad Pitt’s Plan B are among the companies behind the project.
There’s no word on when exactly The Departed will bow on the streaming service, but it’s another addition to a growing catalogue of original content from the retail giant, which includes The Man In The High Castle, Bosch, and Transparent.