Like a detective going so deep undercover that only a few are even aware he exists, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is joining the growing litany of movie-to-TV adaptations as a series for Amazon—though only the barest traces of its identity will remain. Detroit 1-8-7 creator Jason Richman, Warner Bros. TV, and the same production groups behind Scorsese’s Oscar-winning 2006 film (though not Scorsese himself) are developing a new take on the crime drama set in present-day Chicago, where a young cop embeds himself within a Latino gang and butts heads with the gang’s own plant inside the city’s police department, who feeds his bosses information in whatever downtime he gets between shooting black men.
The Departed itself took the Hong Kong setting of its source material, the 2002 thriller Infernal Affairs, then turned it into a loose retelling of Boston gangster Whitey Bulger where Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin et al. yelled at each other in thick-as-chowdah accents for a couple hours. So while many would argue that The Departed is defined by its very Boston-ness, the fact remains that its premise has already withstood such geographical transplants; all this new Departed needs to do is swap out the slang and replace Dropkick Murphys with some nice Wilco. With the inexhaustible need for new and gritty content, maybe someday everybody’s city can get their very own Departed.
