HBO and Martin Scorsese Making Shutter Island TV Series

And the stream of popular movies heading to cable continues to grow with a new Shutter Island-based show in development at HBO: Ashecliffe. But this time, the film’s director Martin Scorsese and the source material novelist responsible for it all, Dennis Lehane, are onboard for more than just a name-only executive producer credit.

As first reported in Deadline, HBO and Paramount Television are in deep talks to produce Ashecliffe as a continuation of the 2010 thriller that starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshall who ends up on the island under mysterious circumstances. Further, it is being sold with the plan of having Martin Scorsese direct the pilot episode of the series from a screenplay by Lehane himself.

Apparently an idea from Paramount Television, the fact that the original talent is enthusiastic about working on the project is its most intriguing aspect. Scorsese famously made his first foray into long-form storytelling when he directed the pilot for Terence Winter’s Boardwalk Empire in 2010, which he famously executive produced. With Boardwalk Empire winding down its final season on HBO, it would seem that the legendary auteur is not done yet working with the premium cable giant.

The curious aspect of this, however, is that the “creepy asylum” ambiance of the 2010 film, which saw Scorsese channeling his inner-Kubrick for certain scenes, was ultimately a distraction to a far deeper and more troubling horror about mental illness and man’s capacity for violence and denial that Lehane rather brilliantly sneaked into his book (and by extension the last 20 minutes of the film). Moving beyond that core principal, the thriller aspects of Shutter Island were intentionally a case of misdirection. How that can be expanded into a weekly TV series remains to be seen.

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