Deadline is reporting that The Shield and Gotham star Michael Chiklis has signed on to executive produce and star in Coyote, a crime drama set on the U.S.-Mexico border, which has been created by Michelle MacLaren (Breaking Bad).
The potential series will see Chiklis playing Ben Clemens, a United States Border Patrol Agent who, on the day of mandatory retirement, discovers an illicit tunnel used to mainline black market goods into the United States from Mexico – a discovery which puts makes him a target of the criminal mastermind he’s spent his career trying to take down.
“It’s a part tailor-made for him; it’s a really complex character,” said Kent Alterman of Paramount Network. “He’s a border patrol agent, and he is forced into retirement, and then he gets sucked into all sides of that world, the drug cartels in Mexico, the human trafficking and the authorities on the U.S. side. The deeper he goes into that world, he discovers more complicated, sometimes dark and nefarious characters.”
“It’s almost like a Breaking Good in a way, because the more he gets sucked into those worlds, the more he gets in touch with his own humanity and keeps evolving as a better person,” Alterman continued. “It just feels like a very relatable, timely world to explore, but in a way that both has broad appeal, but is more challenging and more rewarding for someone who would invest their time in it where you can go really deep with character and exploring all of the nuances of what it means to be human.”
