We’ve been hearing about The History Channel, Lifetime and A&E’s joint miniseries venture, Bonnie & Clyde, for months and months. The new miniseries stars The Borgias actress Holliday Grainger and Into the Wild actor Emile Hirsch as the notorious couple, who engaged in low-end theft but became famous thanks to the couple’s relationship and Bonnie’s wild sex appeal.
The sex appeal of the couple’s relationship is certainly being played up in the first trailer for the series, which showcases Grainger’s Bonnie as a woman who totes guns around using her brightly-colored garters. Though we’ve seen some shots of Grainger and Hirsch in costume, in the trailer, we also get our first look at William Hurt and Holly Hunter, who will also play key characters in the miniseries. Hurt is set to play Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, who was involved in tracking Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow during their crime sprees in the 1930s. Hunter is on board to play Bonnie’s mother, a woman with three children and no husband to support them who works as a seamstress in Dallas.
Most people already know the fates of Parker and Barrow, and the preview doesn’t really hold back on explaining the couple’s eventual downfall. What it does leave us to fill in, then, is the story leading to the crime spree, the story leading to the illicit love affair, and the story leading to Bonnie and Clyde’s crime sprees eventually catching up to them. Those should all be stories worth telling, although we’ll have to wait and see whether those different storylines fold seamlessly into one interesting TV event.
In an unprecedented move, the two-night miniseries event will not be shown exclusively on one network. Instead, the four-hour series will be shown simultaneously on three different networks, the aforementioned Lifetime, History Channel, and A&E. So, if you are interested in Bonnie & Clyde, you can pick your network of choice and watch from there. It seems like the sister networks are hoping that spreading out the content will bring in a few more eyeballs, but it also means that the viewers could be spread thinner, which would affect the way the ratings news was presented the next day. Even if all three networks do well with viewers, it may not have the same impact as something like Hatfields & McCoys.
Hopefully, Bonnie & Clyde will prove to be a good one. John Rice and Joe Batteer and two-time Oscar nominee Bruce Beresford directed the endeavor, but we still have a while to wait before we can pass judgment on the series. Bonnie & Clyde will hit the networks on Sunday, December 8 and Monday, December 9 at 9 p.m. ET. You can check out more over at A&E's site.
