Scalped: 8 Reasons It's Going To Make An Amazing TV Show
6. Its Influences
Scalped, whether its creators knew it or not, shares a lot of its DNA with some of the all-time great Westerns and crime sagas over the last 50 years. It'sThe Godfather and The Sopranos, Deadwood and Donnie Brasco, The Departed and No Country for Old Men all rolled up into one.
The best part about this blend of influences is that it works, completely. It carries with it a sense of familiarity that is kept fresh and engaging because of its setting; never before has there been a story like this, set on a reservation like it is, on a stage where it can be consumed by so much of the general public.
Creator Jason Aaron has spoken about being influenced by Michael Mann's Crime Story, an 80s show about one cop chasing a hood on the rise. The story for Scalped came about fairly naturally from the idea of an undercover FBI agent on the rez trying to bring down the big crime boss - in the end, Dashiell Bad Horse's pursuit of Lincoln Red Crow. In the end, it became so much more.
When Aaron spoke with CBR in 2011 he also mentioned how he was just getting into The Wire around the same time he started writing Scalped so it probably had "a profound effect" on what he was doing. The influence is clear in the writing, with Aaron's expert blend of characters on opposite sides of the law along with the civilians caught up in between. Local teenager Dino especially bears more than a passing resemblance to the character Michael Lee (played by Tristan Wilds) on The Wire, who appears in Season 4 and 5.
He also mentioned how Deadwood's Al Swearengen was a big model for what he wanted to do with Red Crow in Scalped, and the resemblance makes itself clear to many who both read the comic and watched that cult classic HBO series. The influences on Scalped are not only clear but extremely well put to use.
For all of Scalped's influences, tone and origins, it's clear that it always existed as a prestige TV show in comic book form - all that Doug Jung and WGN America have to do is port it back to the television format from which it so clearly derived its fabric.