SundanceTV announced today the greenlight of its next original drama series Hap and Leonard. The project is based on the rollicking Joe Lansdale Southern noir book series. The series will produce six one-hour episodes for its first season. It will begin production in 2015 and will air in early 2016.
Hap and Leonard focuses on an unlikely pair of best friends and martial arts experts who struggle through misadventures, to stay on the right side of the law in 1980's East Texas.
Hap Collins is a white working class laborer who spent time in federal prison as a young man for refusing to be drafted into the military and serve in the Vietnam War. Now in his late thirties, he is just barely making ends meet picking roses on an East Texas plantation. His colleague and lifelong best friend is Leonard Pine, a six-foot five, gay, black Vietnam vet with anger issues. Leonard was raised by his uncle who shunned him after learning he was gay leaving Hap as his only support in the not so progressive rural South. By turns funny and shocking, Hap and Leonard provides an unpredictable and side-eyed look into race, class and friendship.
Sarah Barnett, SundanceTV President, commented, "Equal parts shocking and hilarious, Hap and Leonard will cut through in a crowded TV landscape as irresistible southern pulp noir. Jim Mickle and Nick Damici have a delightfully fresh approach to storytelling, creating vivid characters set in a picaresque world of deep friendship and occasional blood curdling incident. What's more, Jim and Nick are true Sundance voices, having made a splash in recent years at Sundance Film Festival with their feature film. We couldn't be happier to add Hap and Leonard to our line up of daring scripted shows."
Produced by Sundance Studios, the series is created by director/writer Jim Mickle and writer Nick Damici, who partnered on the film adaptation of Lansdale's Cold in July with Michael C. Hall and Sam Shepard. Mickle will also direct. The project is executive produced by Nick Shumaker and Jeremy Platt, along with co-executive producers Joe Lansdale and Lowell Northrop and consulting producer Linda Moran.
