L.A. Confidential was a big enough hit when it opened in 1997 that you would have been right to fear a terrible sequel-- after all, a story about corrupt detectives and seedy 1940s Los Angeles would have lent itself pretty easily to a follow-up story about a new foe. But somehow fate smiled upon us, and a sequel to L.A. Confidential is coming 16 years later, and in the exact right format: on television.
According to Deadline, James Ellroy-- who wrote the novel that Curtis Hanson's film was based on-- is shopping an L.A. Confidential sequel as a TV series, offering it to broadcast and cable networks along with "emerging distribution platforms," which I'm assuming is Netflix. The description only says vaguely that the series would "continue themes and stories from L.A. Confidential," and with no mention of any continuing characters it seems they might be sidestepping entirely the issue of casting actors to replace the likes of Kevin Spacey, Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe and Danny DeVito.
Then again, without those talents, is L.A. Confidential as good as we remember? Films based on Ellroy's work since then, like The Black Dahlia and Street Kings, definitely haven't been as stellar, and it's far too easy to make a period detective/gangster movie that apes L.A. Confidential's style with none of the charm, as Ruben Fleischer did with Gangster Squad. If the TV version of Confidential can mimic the film's energy and come up with deeper and intriguing stories suited to TV, we might have some gangsters to rival Boardwalk Empire's Nucky Thompson-- something that, honestly, I would have expected to happen by now anyway.
