When Robert De Niro Shows up on TV, it's always in a supremely limited fashion, and there are usually laughs involved. For good reason, as he's been great on Saturday Night Live and Extras, among other series. But he'll soon get his first leading role on the small screen soon alongside actress Julianne Moore, and the untitled project just landed a stellar home at Amazon. There's no need to worry about this being too limited, either, as the studio reportedly dropped a ton of money on not just one season of the new show, but two!
The new series, which will likely fall into the crime drama subgenre, will reteam Robert De Niro with his Silver Linings Playbook director David O. Russell, whom he worked with last on Joy. With the strength of Julianne Moore's involvement also there, it was clear when it was first announced that this would be a highly sought-after piece of entertainment, and Amazon has committed upwards of $160 million in this double-season deal, according to Deadline. It appears FX was also in the running to get this drama on their side, but Amazon won out. The company has proven in the past that it's comfortable spending money on projects it believes in, and getting a new De Niro crime drama should damned well be worth it.
Each season will consist of eight episodes, so that's right at $10 million an episode. All episodes will be written and directed by David O. Russell, making this a lot more than just a side project for him. While the filmmaker's movies aren't made on the cheap or anything, he's not a director well known for big action set pieces, so it would be awesome to see him return to his Three Kings days for this project. Loads of TV crime can be done for $10 million and episode. If only we knew anything else about the show to guess what all that crime will look like.
Julianne Moore also isn't one who appears on TV all that often, with her biggest role to date being a recurring one on 30 Rock, but she did appear on both Comedy Central's Inside Amy Schumer and the underseen Hulu comedy Difficult People this year. She'll soon be seen in Todd Haynes' time-spanning drama Wonderstruck. Meanwhile, Robert De Niro will soon be seen on the big screen again in the long-in-the-works comedy appropriately titled The Comedian, and he'll also appear on TV next year for HBO's Bernie Madoff movie The Wizard of Lies.
No word or not whether this top-notch series will hit Amazon's streaming lineup in 2017 or 2018, but it doesn't need to be said that fans will be waiting to watch. In the meantime, check out what you can catch in the first part of next year with our 2017 midseason schedule.
