After news earlier this year broke about the long-in-development Halo TV series, fans have been clamoring for more details. We now know that Master Chief will play an important role in the Showtime Halo series. According to IGN, this news came from the Showtime panel during the Television Critics Association press tour.
Showtime’s President of Programming, Gary Levine, stated that the series is an “enormous undertaking”, with the series taking place across “multiple planets.” He also confirmed that Master Chief will be a “lead character” in the series. Showtime President and CEO David Levine added that “We made a conscious decision to hire a writer not known for sci-fi and not known for big battle movies, because that’s already baked into the Halo franchise and we will service that, but we also wanted to ensure that we were getting beneath the formidable armor of the Spartans and really getting inside the team drama so it felt like it belonged on Showtime. As David said, our hopes and dreams are that it will have enormous appeal to Halo fans and will also appeal to Showtime drama fans.”
In response to questions regarding whether or not this would be an original story, Levine said “It is a new story but we are being incredibly respectful of the canon and working with the Microsoft 343 people to be sure we don’t violate any of that.”
This is very exciting news for Halo fans. While it’ll likely be some time before we see a trailer, all of this news provides promising groundwork. The first season of the series (working title Halo) will consist of ten episodes and will air sometime in 2020. Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) is directing several episodes and serving as executive producer.
