Nicolas Winding Refn has spent the last few years making art in reality-adjacent dreamscapes — meditations on violence (Only God Forgives) and idol worship (Neon Demon) that are defined by lush color palettes and sparse dialogue. They’re movies with loosely established narratives that viewers are meant to exist inside of and then extract their own moral conclusions, and the results have been pretty polarizing. That’s all a distant cry, however, from where he started, making visceral, urban crime dramas in his native Denmark. Variety is reporting that the Drive director will get back to his gritty roots with a new Amazon series called Too Old to Die Young, which will go straight to series with a ten-episode order and focus on the criminal underworld of Los Angeles. Variety frames it as similar to Refn’s Pusher trilogy, which followed the interweaving lives of a group of drug traffickers and thugs, and garnered Refn international attention as a rising film star back in the mid-1990s. This will be the director’s first TV project, and second production for Amazon. There will almost certainly be lots and lots of violence.
