The Purge is one of America’s most fascinating (if sometimes undercooked) thriller franchises at the moment. The series centers around the one night a year when all law enforcement is suspended and everything, short of attacking government installations, is legal, including murder. But the TV series, it turns out, won’t be dealing with the Purge, but the fallout during the other 364 days a year.
The show will be overseen by the series’ creator, James De Monaco, who will be writing and directing the series as well, and while it will feature a Purge, it’ll also delve into why Americans are so intent on killing each other in an America run by a fascist dictatorship. It’ll also air simultaneously on two networks, both USA and Syfy, building up to the fourth Purge movie, arriving in 2018. This might, believe it or not, fill in an odd gap in the series’ logic: Why the hell is everybody so intent on killing each other, instead of looting, robbing banks, and generally stealing stuff? Seriously, here in America, burglaries were one hundred times more common than homicides. The real Purge would backfire because it’d just be Heist Night in America where everybody steals TVs.
Anyway, the show will help fill in a few of the gaps the movies necessarily gloss over, like how the hell this happened in the first place. Considering The Purge isn’t a subtle franchise, we fully expect it to spend a lot of time ripping on the current administration. After all, they already have the creepy masks.
(via Deadline)