One of the joys of the English language is that it makes no sense most of the time. For example, there’s no difference between the singular and plural of the word “series.” I point this out because the original headline of this post was “FX Developing Series About Rasputin and Wild West Train Robbing Brothers,” which made it sound like all that was happening in one new show, and now I desperately want to see a show about Rasputin joining a frontier train robbing gang.
With that huge letdown out of the way, here are the actual descriptions, via Deadline. First, Rasputin, which the network is calling an event series at this point.
Prison Break creator Paul Scheuring will write the script based on the upcoming book Rasputin: Dark Forces And The Fall of The Romanovs by Douglas Smith. Per FX, the event series centers on “one of the most controversial characters in history who is held responsible for bringing down the Russian Empire and changing the course of the world as we know it” and answers the question, “who was he really beyond the folklore, a true healer or the greatest charlatan the world has known?”
And now the train robbers, which will be a six-episode miniseries based on Ron Hansen’s 1979 novel, Desperadoes.
Desperadoes, produced by Fox TV Studios, chronicles the infamous Dalton Gang’s dangerous crime spree in the 1890s, as seen through the eyes of the youngest brother Emmett Dalton. The gang, which included three Dalton brothers, specialized in bank and train robberies. In Hansen’s book, Emmet Dalton — aged 65 in 1937 — is the sole survivor of the infamous gang and makes a living by selling his outrageous stories of murder, bootlegging and thievery to Hollywood.
Yup, still want these to be one show. And when I dug through the Getty archive to find a Rasputin-related picture to run with this post, I also found out there’s a Russian polar bear named Rasputin. The show could star him. As a train robber. I am full of good ideas today.
