The leading character of the 1995 neo-noir mystery Devil in a Blue Dress, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins is getting his own TV series. Originally portrayed in the feature film by Denzel Washington, Rawlins is a character created by author Walter Mosley and is featured in his bestselling books.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Amblin Television is teaming up with Mosley to develop a TV series adapted from the books.
More scoop from THR:
Easy, previously brought to life by Denzel Washington in the 1995 feature Devil in a Blue Dress and based on Mosley’s book of the same name, is a Black World War II Army veteran turned hard-boiled private eye. The potential series will be set in 1950s Los Angeles and will honor the detective genre, while also exploring the racial inequalities and social injustice experienced by Black people and other people of color.
Mosley also has TV writing credits in FX’s Snowfall and CBS All Access’ Star Trek: Discovery, the latter of which he quit after the HR department “chastised” him for using the N-word at work. Authoring more than 60 books, that man be writin’—so much so that he can teach a masterclass. Oh wait, he did.
“I don’t find the fact of watching a movie, growing me intellectually or spiritually, the way reading a book will,” Mosley said on The Root’s It’s Lit podcast back in December. “Because you make up the book while you’re reading it; the film is telling you everything you should be looking at, what you should be thinking, how people sound, everything...I’m not trying to say it’s useless. But it’s not as, for me, as powerful as the written word.”
Still, Mosley is on an adaptation ride as it was recently announced he’d also be adapting his own novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey into a limited series on Apple+, starring Samuel L. Jackson.
As this upcoming Easy Rawlins series was just announced (we don’t even have a confirmed network attached yet) and we’re currently experiencing a pandemic production era where shoots can be canceled and rescheduled at a moment’s notice, we’re a long ways from the premiere of this series, but I’m already wondering the obvious—could we possibly get a Denzel cameo?
I guess we’ll see when we see.