Rocky Balboa Is Producing a Serial Killer Show. We Discuss.
Rocky Balboa is producing a serial killer show. Allow that to settle for a moment.
Sylvester Stallone — through his company Balboa Productions — has signed on as executive producer of a television adaptation of J.D. Barker's 4MK thriller series, a Chicago-set trilogy beginning with The Fourth Monkey (2017). The showrunner is Channing Powell, who cut her teeth on The Walking Dead and White Collar, and who is presumably the person who will have to determine whether any of this actually works on screen.
The 4MK books centre on Sam Porter, a detective tracking a serial killer who communicates through three-part packages containing ears, eyes, and tongues — a detail that functions, one supposes, as atmosphere. A prequel to the original trilogy arrives in September, which is probably not a coincidence. Stallone has called the series a world with «enormous scale, real danger» and «the kind of mythology that is tailor-made for premium television.» Barker expressed confidence that the show «will be the kind of series that gets under people's skin and stays there.» A Kirkus reviewer, somewhat less persuaded by the mythology, described the first book as: «Wipe away all the blood and you're left with a dull, unsurprising serial killer tale.»
There is something worth watching in this particular collaboration, and it is not the blood. It is the logic of the current television moment: the assumption that mythology equals scale, scale equals premium, premium equals something worth attaching a recognizable name to. The 4MK announcement arrives in a week alongside several other adaptation announcements, all speaking the same grammar — existing intellectual property, built-in audience, prestige packaging.
It is not that television adaptations are inherently bad. Far from it. But there is a quiet suspicion, not entirely unfair, that the pipeline between thriller fiction and streaming has grown so well-oiled that the question is no longer «is this a story worth telling?» but «does this have an audience already?» The 4MK series does. That appears, for the moment, to be sufficient.
What Barker presumably knows, having written four books in this world, is that mythology was always only as good as what happened inside it. The same is true of television. Stallone's name in the credits won't answer the question that matters most: whether Sam Porter, freed from the page, has something to say. We'll find out, presumably, around the same time the prequel hits shelves.
