It’s a very bad time to be a replicant, but that makes it a very good time to be a fan of Ridley Scott’s 1983 sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner. Not only did we receive a surprisingly good, if wholly unnecessary, sequel in 2017 thanks to Dune director Denis Villeneuve, but the Blade Runner: Black Lotus anime spin-off series just premiered on Adult Swim earlier this month. Now, the man who started it all is going back to the far-off Los Angeles of... 2019?
Actually, all we know for certain is what Scott told the BBC (via Indiewire) in an interview held earlier today: “We [have already] written the pilot for Blade Runner and the [series] bible. So, we’re already presenting Blade Runner as a TV show, the first 10 hours.” Given that there’s likely to be a bidding war between networks and streaming services for a series with such a huge, built-in cult following, I think we can all rest assured this series will make it to TV screens.
So the question is, what will the show be about? The immediate answer would be more adventures of Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, likely prior to the event of the first movie. It could just be a series of his other Blade Runner cases hunting down the rogue bioengineered beings called Replicants, which sounds awesome. However, as alluded to before, the futuristic events of the first movie take place in 2019, which could be awkward depending on how tied into the franchise’s continuity Scott wants to be. It could also be set in 2049, the era of Villeneuve’s sequel, and show other cases of K, assuming Ryan Gosling would be interested in doing more. But the series could take place then, or earlier, or another era entirely with all new characters—it’s not like Deckard and K were ever the only Blade Runners working in the greater Los Angeles megalopolis area, let alone the rest of the world.
Blade Runner is the second of Scott’s two greatest films to get a live-action TV series. The first is Alien, which is being overseen by Fargo and Legion’s Noah Hawley, without the director’s involvement. Suffice it to say, he is unenthusiastic about the project. There’s been no announcement for when either Alien or Blade Runner will make their way to TV, but you can currently watch Blade Runner: Black Lotus Sundays on Adult Swim.
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DISCUSSION
Honestly, I don’t know that this is good news at all? The animated series looks bad and is sort of boring and bland at best on top of that. Blade Runner 2049 was an amazing miracle of ambition and storytelling realized, but that had a creative crew that was damn near perfect for what the movie was trying to do (Villeneuve, Deakins, Fancher, Green, Gosling, Zimmer, so on and so forth). It’s weird that Bricken shoehorns in his weird “unneccessary” dig at THAT movie instead of the CG cartoon. (the idea there needs to be a “necessity” to prompt this sort of stuff is bullshit in the first place, but anyway...)
Ridley Scott hasn’t ever (seriously, not since 1982) established he actually gets why his movie worked, and has gone out of his way multiple times in the meantime to diminish it with after-the-fact tinkering. And then on top of that, he’s talked shit about 2049 even though it’s arguably a better made film than his original was.
So if he’s in charge of a live-action TV series based on Blade Runner, I’m not 100% convinced that’s a good thing. I know what’s definitely not a good thing: Trying to marvel-ize/Franchise-up Blade Runner into some hyper-inter-connected celebration of fucking “LORE” or whatever that turns Blade Runner into yet another nerd exercise in connecting wiki bullet points together in the faint form of an actual story.