Starz has been busy rolling out a new original lineup in the New Year. First to hit the schedule was the pirate drama Black Sails, but moving forward into 2014, the premium cable network also has Outlander and Power on the docket. On Tuesday, the network released the first full trailer for the latter. It’s a doozy, filled with club hopping and a few powerful figures working within the New York nightlife scene.
In the trailer we meet James “Ghost” St. Patrick, a wealthy entrepreneur who has dealings in New York’s nightclubs along with the Big Apple’s drug networks. He’s a man living a double life, and he seems pretty O.K. with it, noting at the beginning of the first trailer that people come to his nightclub to “become whoever they want to be.” It’s advice he’s clearly taken to heart. As the trailer progresses, we see how St. Patrick put together the nightclub in order to “clean” the money from his lucrative drug deals. Regardless, the hot spot seems to represent more than a drug front for the man. It seems to represent the potential for a more routine and crime-free life. Of course, it’s not so easy to get out of the drug business and the Power trailer shows plenty of moments of violence and seduction, as well.
It’s a glitzy trailer, and it reminds me a little of the world Magic City offered us a few years ago, where glamorous people were mixed in with a world of crimes and misdemeanors. The pace of Magic City seems much slower, however, and hopefully Power will offer fans a faster-paced hour of television that they can easily engage in. To do that, it’ll need really crisp writing with a long-term vision, but given what we’ve seen from Starz, that’s certainly within the realm of possibility.
We still have some time before Power actually begins airing. The short trailer notes that the show will hit the schedule sometime this summer, but Starz is still staying mum about when that might be. Fortunately, when it comes to the premium cable networks, timeslots are a whole lot less important because the overall goal is to get people to subscribe, not necessarily to get them to watch at one specific time. In the age of DVR, that’s a far better business model anyway, though something tells me Starz wouldn’t object to breaking any specific timeslot records.
Power comes from Courtney Kemp Agboh, a producer on The Good Wife. Curtis Jackson, otherwisde known as 50 Cent, is executive producing the glitzy new drama, which is set to star Omari Hardwick, Naturi Naughton, Joseph Sikora and many more. Catch them in action this summer, only on Starz. You can learn more about the series here.
