Ostensibly retired film director and prolific TV producer Steven Soderbergh is teaming up with Netflix and screenwriter Scott Frank for a new limited series, the streaming service’s second after the Gilmore Girls revival that’s currently in the works. Soderbergh will executive produce while Frank writes and directs Godless, which is being described as a Western set in the 1880s. The pair previously worked together on 1998’s Out Of Sight, the film that inflicted Soderbergh with his “George Clooney as a charismatic thief” addiction that came to dominate so much of his 2000s-era film output. We can only hope the new series doesn’t lead to a similar case of burgeoning Soderberghian obsession, because we’re not sure if we could put up with the Ocean’s-esque diminishing returns of Godlesser and Godlessest.
Frank’s post-Sight output has been a series of quiet successes; his credits are full of easy crowd-pleasers like Marley & Me and Minority Report, and his 2007 directorial debut, the Joseph Gordon-Levitt-starring The Lookout, earned wide critical acclaim. Soderbergh, meanwhile, has spent his retirement from filmmaking—which may or may not soon be coming to a close—playing Premium-Cable-And-Streaming-Service TV Producing Bingo. His current projects include Cinemax’s The Knick, Red Oaks for Amazon, HBO’s weird interactive TV project Mosaic, and a Starz-based adaptation of his own The Girlfriend Experience, meaning that he’s pretty much just a Hulu series and a YouTube webisode away from winning the game for good.