The Purge TV show concept finally revealed

Fans of the The Purge films are well aware what happens on an annual night in the franchise when people can commit pretty much any crimes they like (spoiler alert: they commit a lot of crimes). But what happens the rest of the year in the dystopian universe created by writer-director James DeMonaco? That’s the question which will be answered in Blumhouse’s new The Purge TV show. Monday at the NBC upfront presentation in New York, Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum announced the show will reveal how this “awful law” affects America during the other 364 days a year. (And, maybe, also how they get all that blood of the walls.)

It was first announced in April that The Purge franchise will make its way to the small screen. The show is being overseen by DeMonaco and produced by Blumhouse Television.

“I’ll probably write the pilot [and] I came up with the idea for the first season,” DeMonaco told this writer the day 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.”

The TV version of The Purge is to being co-produced with Universal Cable Production and will air on USA and Syfy.

Additional reporting by Natalie Abrams.