The Coen Brothers move to TV, but will continue their exploration of American history with ‘The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs’

Earlier this week I created a list of 5 film directors that, rather excitingly, are currently working on television projects in 2017. But that entire list almost immediately became overshadowed with the revelation on Tuesday that the Coen Brothers are moving to the small screen with ‘The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs’.

According to Variety, ‘The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs’ will mysteriously combine television and the theatrical, and the sibling cinematic luminaries have written the script from an original idea, while they will also direct it as a miniseries.

Other than that, all that we know about the project it that it was considered too big for one feature film, while it will involve six different story lines, and is set in the Old West. The Coens are no strangers to the genre. Aspects of the Western have appeared in plenty of their films, with ‘True Grit’, ‘No Country For Old Men’, and ‘Blood Simple’ the most obvious examples.

This delving into America’s past has become a tradition for the Coen Brothers, as the duo have actually painted a rich tapestry of the country’s history on the big-screen. While ‘Blood Simple’, ‘Raising Arizona’, ‘Fargo’, ‘Intolerable Cruelty’, ‘The Ladykillers’, and ‘Burn After Reading’ were set in and around the years that they were made, ‘Miller’s Crossing’ took a look at the 1920s Prohibition era, ‘Barton Fink’ did the same with 1940s Hollywood, while ‘The Hudsucker Proxy’ was set in 1950s New York when the city was as cool and suave as it has ever been.

The trend continued on with ‘The Big Lebowski’s’ vague examination of Reaganism in the 1980s, ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?’ thrived because it was set in the deep south during the Great Depression, ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There’ was a noir set in 1949, ‘A Serious Man’ was their most personal project yet as it unfolded in Minnesota in 1967, ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ took place in 1961 in New York City’s Greenwich Village when it was the hippest place in the country, and their last project ‘Hail, Caesar!’ returned to the 1950s, but this time was set in a Hollywood ravaged by the paranoia of the Cold War.

Each time the Coen Brothers haven’t just evoked the setting and period in a detailed and resonant fashion, but they’ve also imbued it with their own irreverent humour, quirks, and sensibilities, too, factors that have combined to make them the quintessential cinematic auteurs of the modern age.

The fact that the Oscar-winning duo now have the chance to do that in an elongated fashion, while this time probing the Old West when it was in is pomp, means that ‘The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs’ has immediately become one of the most anticipated outings that’s currently in development, and is the ultimate proof that the line between the small and big screen has never been more nondescript.