Danny Boyle's 'Trust' TV Series Has Epic Plans To Span 50 Years Over 5 Seasons

Last year, it was announced that Danny Boyle would be directing and producing a new television series called Trust for FX. While none of my all-time favorite films are directed by Boyle, the British filmmaker remains one of my favorite directors to watch and his new television series sounds epic. It's now been revealed that Boyle has planned a 5 season story arc for the series, which will span 50 years. Learn more about the Trust TV series now after the jump.

Trust was pitched as a based-on-a-true-story limited series about the Getty family (as in Getty Oil, the Getty Museum, and Balthazar Getty), with the first installment taking place in 1973 focusing on John Paul Getty III. Now we have learned via Collider that Boyle has planned for this series to cover a much wider span of time over its five seasons:

Each series would shoot every year for five years, and each series is about a different decade. The first one would be set in the '70s and would happen in Italy and England, and we're hoping to begin shooting that this summer.

Boyle also confirmed that he wouldn't be directing every episode, like Soderbergh did with The Knick and Cary Fukunaga did with True Detective. Instead, the plan is for Boyle to direct the first two or three episodes, kind of like how David Fincher approached House of Cards:

I'd love to do them all. I think that would be wrong because I think the danger is you are not allowing the form to take over. You'd be doing 10 mini-films, which is not the form. The format is that you're letting the characters tell the story and directors are an aid to that rather than the driving force. I'm going to limit to two or three. We're just in the process of deciding whether it should be two or three.

It's unclear if Boyle will come back to direct episodes in subsequent seasons or just remain as the godfather of the series, overseeing from afar. Boyle is executive producing Trust with frequent collaborators Christian Colson and Simon Beaufoy, with whom he worked on Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours. Colson wrote the script, which has been described as "equal parts family history, dynastic saga and satirical examination of the corrosive power of money."

Here is the official synopsis for the first season:

When the young Getty is kidnapped in Rome and his mafia captors are banking on a multi-million dollar ransom. After all, what rich family wouldn't pay for the return of a loved one? 'Trust' charts the young man's nightmare ordeal at the hands of kidnappers who cannot understand why nobody seems to want their captive back. The Italian police think it's a prank and decline to investigate. Paul's father is lost in a heroin daze in London and refuses to answer the phone. Paul's grandfather — possibly the richest man in the world — is marooned in a Tudor mansion in the English countryside surrounded by five mistresses and a pet lion. He's busy. Only Paul's mother is left to negotiate with increasingly desperate kidnappers. Problem is, she's broke.

I really love the new limited series format of television, allowing filmmakers to tell contained one-season stories that don't have to stretch to fit the traditional multi-season plan. Fargo has done a great job with this, flashing between different decades to tell stories set within the same locations and exploring similar themes. Netflix's Narcos has also excelled at this, although we don't know how the smooth transition will be since Pablo Escobar, the driving character from the first two seasons, won't be back for the upcoming third season.

It seems like Boyle has some epic plans and I'm excited to experience a story spanning five decades. I really don't know much about the Getty family story, but it sounds like it has a lot of potential. The first ten-episode season of the series is the only one greenlit at this time and the planned four sequel seasons will likely be determined by viewership. Let's hope it's good and that people watch it.