Hunter S. Thompson lived one hell of a life, boozing, smoking, and dosing his way through major journalistic assignments and pioneering his own bat-shit crazy genre of nonfiction along the way. Now, it looks like we’re going to get a TV series all about the rogue writer, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Davey Holmes is set to serve as showrunner for MGM Television’s new authorized series, currently titled Fear and Loathing, alongside Nebraska screenwriter Bob Nelson. Holmes, who has an overall deal with MGM TV, currently serves as the showrunner for the channel’s Get Shorty series, and worked as an executive producer on Shameless, Pushing Daisies, and In Treatment before that.
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“Davey is tremendously talented and has demonstrated that he can deliver quality programming that will resonate with viewers,” MGM Television Group president Mark Burnett said in a statement.
While there have already been a number of movies focused on the writer’s life and work—one starring Bill Murray, and two featuring Johnny Depp—this would be the first scripted TV series about Thompson. Before he died, Thompson toured the underbelly of Las Vegas, hammed it up at the Kentucky Derby, and embedded with the Hell’s Angels, among countless other escapades in the name of journalism. What’s more, he was drunk, high, and otherwise out of his mind constantly—a habit he kept up while reporting, and even when he sat down to write.
Fear and Loathing is currently in development, and it’s still too early to know when the series is coming to the small screen, or who might play the writer. Depp would probably give up a limb for the chance, but the HST fanboy might be a little too old to keep channeling his hard-drinking idol.
