Paramount preps US-Mexico border drama

Paramount Network has added a series from Emmy-winning executive producer Michelle MacLaren (Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad) to its growing scripted slate.

Keith Cox

Coyote (10×60′) comes from Sony Pictures Television, MacLaren Entertainment and Dark Horse Entertainment and has Michael Chiklis (The Shield) attached to star and executive produce.

Scheduled to debut in 2020, the show joins Paramount Network’s growing scripted slate which also features Yellowstone, 68 Whiskey, Emily in Paris and Paradise Lost (working title).

MacLaren will direct the pilot and executive produce the series, in which Chiklis plays a man who, after 32 years as a border patrol agent, is forced to work for the very people he spent his career trying to keep out of the US.

Now exposed to life on the other side of the wall, he starts to question his black and white views of the world, challenging his ideology and his loyalties.

David Graziano (American Gods, Southland) will serve as showrunner. Graziano, Michael Carnes and Josh Gilbert (Mr Woodcock) are attached to write and executive produce Coyote.

Dark Horse Entertainment’s Mike Richardson and Keith Goldberg (The Umbrella Academy) are executive producers. Rebecca Hobbs of MacLaren Entertainment is also an executive producer.

MacLaren said the show will “dramatise a conversation between Mexico and America” featuring a “complex character whose journey will expose multiple points of view on this relevant and complicated issue.”

“The powerful, timely setting and complex characters are a perfect fit with the rest of our growing scripted slate. Coyote is befitting of the strong Paramount name,” added Keith Cox, president of development at Paramount Network and TV Land.

“While most of our shows and movies come from our own library, in Coyote, we found an original idea and character that were undeniable and attracted this incredible creative team,” said Mike Richardson, Dark Horse Entertainment’s president and founder.

Cox and Lauren Ruggiero, VP of development for Paramount Network, will oversee Coyote for the network.