Given *gestures at the shitshow of America in the last 11 months*, it’s perhaps not surprising that the last time white people went truly bugnuts crazy, in the early 1990s, has been capturing the imagination of filmmakers recently. “Oklahoma City,” about the worst domestic terrorism incident in American history, is one of the best documentaries we’ve seen this year, Sam Worthington and Paul Bettany starred in a miniseries about the Unabomber, and Jaume Collet-Serra is planning a movie about the Waco siege.
But the most promising of all these projects might be one about the same subject matter as the latter: “Waco.” As the title suggests, the six-part miniseries, which will air on the newly-rebranded Paramount Network (formerly Spike TV) as part of their big push into original content, will take a look at religious loon David Koresh and his Branch Davidian church, who ended up in an armed standoff with the FBI after a botched ATF raid ended, tragically, in the death of 76 people in a fire (as well as four government agents in a shootout two months earlier).
The show is created by John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle, who were behind horrors “Devil” and “As Above So Below,” and it’s got the kind of starry cast that you might expect from a network trying to make a splash in the prestige cable drama world: Taylor Kitsch, in what looks to be a striking performance, plays Koresh, Michael Shannon plays the agent investigating him, “Supergirl” star Melissa Benoist plays Rachel Koresh, and Andrea Riseborough, Julia Garner, John Leguizamo, Rory Culkin, Paul Sparks, Shea Whigham and Camryn Manheim are in the supporting cast.
And now a first-look trailer has arrived for the show, which certainly looks like it could be an involving true-crime affair, and potentially a crucial look into the kind of mindset that led to *gestures at the shitshow of America in the last 11 months again.* The show will air on the Paramount Network when it launches in January: watch the trailer below.