Scalped: 8 Reasons It's Going To Make An Amazing TV Show
4. The Tone
The tone of the television adaptation of Scalped is going to make or break the series. In the comics, the tone exists as a healthy blend of neo-noir and Western, dark and gritty (one of the story arcs is even titled 'The Gravel In Your Guts'). The dialogue, which lends itself to the tone, is straight out of all the classic Westerns, given a modern spin - Jason Aaron's love of the genre is self-evident on the page, as is his desire to blend the classic tropes and vibe of said genre with those great 'undercover FBI agent' yarns, from Donnie Brasco to The Departed.
The tone on the page can be translated to the screen, but it'll be a hard slog to avoid the show dipping into heightened-reality melodrama. The reason the stylistic dialogue and affected way the characters speak works so well in the original text is because it's all grounded in this earthy, grounded, factually-accurate reality of life on a rez.
It's a balance that was hard for Aaron to achieve in the beginning, as a re-read of the first arc, 'Indian Country', will show you - the writing does tend to be a lot to swallow in terms of Aaron going full throttle with the tone he has in mind. Characters feel like they speak with the knowledge they are in a fictionalised story - everything's slightly ham-fisted and over-the-top.
In time, though, Aaron finds his groove and dials back the style-over-substance way of writing that is particular to his work on Scalped. Once the characters become real people, and the story flows organically, the tone of the entire saga finds a sweet spot that is hard for most comics to achieve. It's stylised, sure - but it has that great anchor in it being set in a believable place in a believable time.
Aaron backs up the tone of his story with such a well-rounded knowledge of his setting and its intricacies that such stylistic flourishes end up becoming earned, and only add to the overall experience of the story.
If the showrunner, Doug Jung, brings all his expertise from Banshee into the mix, and follows Aaron's template without dipping too much into melodrama, audiences could have one of the grittiest, moodiest, most realistic neo-Westerns to ever grace our screens, since, well, Banshee.