The Purge TV Series Details Released

At the NBC upfront presentation on Monday in New York, Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum announced the first details of the upcoming TV series of The Purge, and it’s a little different from what many were expecting.

Straying away from the narrative of The Purge films, which follow the events that take place on the annual Purge Night, the TV series will instead explore what happens on the other 364 days of the year, putting a new spin on the twisted dystopian universe fans have come to love. This will likely mean a lot less violence, but it will give insight as to why people choose to “cleanse their souls” in such a violent way. The series will also get to explore how the annual 12-hour Purge affects people on the other days of the year.

“I’ll probably write the pilot [and] I came up with the idea for the first season,” writer and director of the both the TV series and the movies James DeMonaco told this Entertainment Weekly shortly after the announcement. “When they came to me and said, ‘Are you interested?’ I was like — because I was writing Purge 4 at the time — I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know, so much Purge-ing!’ But what’s great about Purge TV is that the ten hours they’ll be giving us, it allows us to explore character, why someone on this night would do something so heinous as pick up a gun or a knife and do something. It’s exciting because it opens up the idea in a way that I couldn’t do in a 95-minute movie.”

Purge, which was first announced in April and is being produced by Blumhouse Television, is slated to premiere on both USA Network and Syfy in 2018. The fourth movie in The Purge franchise will also be released at that time.