In Yesterday, Danny Boyle imagined a world where The Beatles never existed but everything else was mostly the same for some reason, and his next project is going to be the opposite: Rather than a movie about a world where one popular British rock band never existed, it’s going to be a TV show about a world where one popular British punk band definitely exists—specifically our real world and specifically the Sex Pistols. To put it in less unnecessarily complicated terms, Boyle is making a limited series for FX about the Sex Pistols, based on guitarist Steve Jones’ memoir Lonely Boy: Tales From A Sex Pistol.
The show was announced by a press release yesterday, with Boyle explaining in a statement that the arrival of punk in British society was like “breaking into the world of The Crown and Downton Abbey with your mates and screaming your songs and your fury at all they represent.” That pretty much explicitly implies that Boyle’s show—titled Pistol—will be the anti-Crown or Downton, which is pretty on-the-nose as far as TV shows about punk music go. Like, those shows are stuffy or about the royals! This one is about… being all snide and rude. There’ll probably be bad words and colorful comments about the queen! Some British people are already concerned about The Crown giving viewers the wrong impression about the royals, so we can only imagine the monocle-dropping and a teacup-shattering that will occur when proper society is confronted with the image of some young Sex Pistols writing “God Save The Queen” on this FX series.
Pistol will star Toby Wallace, Anson Boon, Louis Partridge, Jacob Slater, Fabien Frankel, Dylan Llewellyn, Sydney Chandler, Emma Appleton, and Maisie Williams (she’s playing punk icon Pamela Rooke, a.k.a. Jordan).