Over the past couple of years, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been tentatively dipping his toe back into the Terminator waters and teasing the big orange buffoon who helped torpedo the respectability of Schwarzenegger’s once-beloved Republican party, but now he’s going to try his mighty hand at something relatively new: A scripted TV drama. According to Deadline, Schwarzenegger is set to star in and executive produce a new Amazon “event series” called Outrider.
The show is billed as “a mystery set in the Oklahoma Indian Territory in the late 1800s,” and it’s about a “ruthless Federal Marshall” who has to work with a presumably less-ruthless deputy in order to capture a “legendary outlaw” who is hiding in the wilderness. Along the way, “a series of unpredictable surprises will blur the line between good guys and bad.” Schwarzenegger will be playing the ruthless Federal Marshall, and if you’re wondering how they’ll justify this older Austrian bodybuilder playing a Wild West lawman, the Deadline story hand-waves that away by explaining that he “immigrated to the U.S. from Europe as a child.”
Deadline doesn’t say who will play the deputy, but it’d be fun if it’s also an actor from a European country. Americans have been starring in these Westerns for too long anyway.