Are you ready for some period-accurate, racially charged football? AMC is developing a series adaptation of The Real All Americans, Sally Jenkins’ story of the famed football program at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and all of its rowdy, personally invested friends are coming over. Namely actor Tommy Lee Jones, whose Cherokee ancestry and background as an offensive tackle for Harvard have made him AMC’s preferred candidate to direct the story of U.S. cavalry officer Richard Henry Pratt’s 1879 journey into the heart of the Dakota Territory, where he recruited the Native American team that would wage symbolic war on the field against their Ivy League oppressors—a war that presumably rages on inside Jones’ very DNA, which may be why he's always making that face. Should it go forward, the series would become the network’s second post-Civil War drama dealing with racial issues next to the coolly received Hell On Wheels, though All Americans has the added bonus of (eventually) including the early stories of revered athlete Jim Thorpe and coach “Pop” Warner, potentially promising a broader audience. But fewer prostitutes, probably.
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