The Fast And The Furious writer Gary Scott Thompson to turn a Blake Shelton song into a TV show
Few things can ramp up excitement in a project more than saying it’s from one of the people who worked on the Fast And Furious movies. Those movies are fun, the people who make them largely seem pretty competent, and attaching that pedigree to some new thing suggests that it should also be pretty fun and competent. Well, try to maintain that level of excitement as we explain that we’re specifically talking about Gary Scott Thompson, whose name has definitely appeared in the credits of all those good Fast And Furious movies… but only because he wrote the The Fast And The Furious and therefore created Dom Toretto, Brian O’Conner, Letty, Mia Toretto, and… Johnny Tran. Did he ever come back in future movies? Sure he died, but that hasn’t always been a dealbreaker in this series.
Anyway, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Thompson is teaming up with country singer and The Voice judge Blake Shelton on an NBC TV show called In God’s Country that’s supposedly based on Shelton’s song “God’s Country.” We say “supposedly” because the connection seems tenuous at best. The song is about loving the country life and how working on a farm or whatever can be hard but it’s worth it because you’re in “God’s country,” with the chorus noting “the Devil went down to Georgia but he didn’t stick around” because this is “God’s country.”
Meanwhile, Thompson’s TV show is about a “hardworking Midwestern farm family” and the “devastating secret” that a man’s grown-up children discover after he dies, which seems… completely unrelated? Unless the song gives us a clue about that devastating secret, of course. Using a helpful Billboard story called “Here Are The Lyrics To Blake Shelton’s ‘God’s Country’,” we noticed a potential parallel between the TV show pitch and the repeated references to the Devil: Is it possible that the devastating secret is that the father who died was actually none other than Satan himself? Perhaps he went down to Georgia, lookin’ for a soul to steal, since he was in a bind and way behind, but he got sidetracked and started a family in God’s country? That’s probably not what’s going to happen, since you’d put it on the label if this were a show about the children of Lucifer Morningstar reckoning with their father’s dark legacy, but at least it’s coming from… someone who definitely worked on at least one movie in the Fast And Furious series.