It has been 11 years since the first season of True Detective aired on HBO. Nic Pizzolatto’s scripts, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s direction, and the perform
It has been 11 years since the first season of True Detective aired on HBO. Nic Pizzolatto’s scripts, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s direction, and the performances of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in the main roles combined to create something indelible, a height that the anthology series unfortunately could not approach in subsequent installments.
That legendary season also forever bonded McConaughey and Harrelson, both native Texans—though the two had already collaborated on screen before. Their first project together was 1999’s EDtv, a film directed by Ron Howard that anticipated the explosion of reality TV. In 2008, they both appeared in Surfer, Dude, a rather forgettable comedy also featuring another illustrious Texan: Willie Nelson.
All these projects helped McConaughey and Harrelson become close friends, to the point of sharing family vacations. Their children each call the other “uncle.” They’ve even joked that they might be linked by a blood bond, a gag that could have a real basis. In a 2023 appearance on Access Daily, McConaughey explained that his mother, Kay, gave them cause to speculate while they were all vacationing together in the Mediterranean.
“We’re all sitting around in Greece one night talking and my mom out of nowhere in a little pause goes, ‘Oh, I knew your dad, Woody…,’ ” the actor said. “And we all went, ‘What was the ellipsis about? And what was the knew about?’ And she goes, ‘Just saying, we might have frequented the same similar place out in West Texas one time when he was on furlough.’ And we all went, ‘What? What, are you going to leave it there?’ Now we gotta go do some DNA tests.”
If they did ever get those DNA tests, they have not made the results public. As Harrelson later joked on Stephen Colbert’s Late Night, for McConaughey, getting confirmation that he and Harrelson are indeed brothers would be “a much more big deal. I mean, he feels like he is losing a father. But I’m like, no, you’re gaining a different father and a brother.”
The actors set out to take their potential relationship to another level by using it as inspiration for a TV series that, unsurprisingly, would tentatively be titled Brothers. AppleTV+ first announced plans for the show in March of 2023. Its premise is appropriately self-referential: both Harrelson and McConaughey would play exaggerated, fictitious versions of themselves in a comedy that focuses on the entanglements that arise after they decide to reunite their families at McConaughey’s ranch in Texas.
In this scripted series, the members of their respective families would be played by actors—including Holland Taylor as McConaughey’s mother. Harrelson and McConaughey were set to produce the series, which would be show run by David West Read, an Emmy winner for his work on Schitt’s Creek.
Shooting got underway this year, and everything seemed to be going smoothly until a few days ago, when the project ran aground in a way that no one could have expected. According to Deadline, the production has come to a complete halt after West Read decided to abandon it due to imaginative differences. Apparently 8 of the shows 10 episodes of the show had already been completed when the showrunner, screenwriter, and executive producer decided not to continue because he did not agree with the ending of the series.
Now someone modern is being sought to take the helm. The series looks like it may hire Lee Eisenberg, creator of the 2023 Apple TV+ series Lessons in Chemistry, the miniseries starring Brie Larson and Lewis Pullman. McConaughey and Harrelson, meanwhile, have yet to comment on the suspension of the project that was supposed to take their twinning to another level.
Original story in VF Spain.
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