Jon Bernthal is making a Deep South-set crime drama for Amazon called The Bottoms
If you know Jon Bernthal’s career, you know that with any new job he takes, there’s roughly a 90% chance that by the end of the movie/TV show/audiobook/commercial/PTA fundraiser, he’ll have either beaten the shit out of some other guys or gotten the shit beaten out of himself. (Admittedly, we haven’t watched Me And Earl And The Dying Girl in a few years, but let’s just assume our math holds up.) So while we don’t have many details for you yet, it seems safe to assume that someone’s gonna be appearing onscreen with a few new cuts and bruises soon.
That’s because The Hollywood Reporter is announcing the Punisher star is creating, starring in, and also co-writing The Bottoms, a new series in development for Amazon. The show is described as following the “interconnected systems of family structures, friends and neighbors, law enforcement, and criminality all intersecting in Shreveport, Louisiana in the early ’90s. Set in a particularly wild corner of the Deep South, the show will examine the inflection points, the blurred lines, and the human cost on all sides.” So, some sort of Southern-fried version of The Wire combined with The Sopranos, we can hope—no pressure or anything, though, The Bottoms. Along with starring in an as-yet-unknown role, Bernthal will co-executive produce the series alongside Burn Notice producer Ben Watkins.
This is reportedly a longtime passion project for Bernthal, who has apparently been quietly developing it over the past decade. So while we can’t confirm it yet, we suspect that this is 100% the top-secret project he told us about when we interviewed him back in 2017. Back then, he just described it as something set in Shreveport and called it “a story that’s changed the course of my life.” If this thing becomes a hit, soon Shreveport will have to be the one talking about meeting Jon Bernthal, and how he changed the course of its life… Shreveport is a sentient city in this thought experiment. That’s just the kind of fun we like to have.