Scalped: 8 Reasons It's Going To Make An Amazing TV Show
5. Its Effect
You'd be hard=pressed to find a mainstream cultural touchstone for the Native American experience. For such a vibrant culture as this, which pre-dates the existence of the USA by many thousands of years, you'd be surprised (or not) to find that there has been no worthy saga on film or television that depicts what life is like for the modern First Nations person.
Scalped, as much as it is a fictionalised, noir-heavy tale of crime and corruption, could equally be a huge window into the lives lived by a people who have occupied that land for far longer than any other person identifying themselves as American.
Scalped could easily be not only an educational tool for the myriad of people the world over who don't know or understand what it means to be a Native American in today's world, but also a hell of a platform for this under-served people to take their media representation into their own hands. The amount of opportunities on offer here for Native American actors to take on Native American roles reaches an extent that has, perhaps, not been seen for a minority in the USA since Roots.
Admittedly, there can easily be controversy by the fact that the story chooses to focus on the criminal and corrupt aspects of Native American culture - but the argument against this fact is that a) it brings the discussion into the mainstream and b) that Jason Aaron's original story also pays great respect to Native American culture, history and socio-economic issues. It doesn't shy away from the fact that many reservations are third world countries in the heart of the United States of America - if anything, it tackles that problem head on and makes the reader deal with it and question 'why?'.
The result of transporting this ground-breaking story to the medium of television will only serve to make the stage and subsequent audience bigger - which is no small thing.