The Purge TV Series’ Latest Trailer Looks Promising – Today’s News: Our Take

The newest trailer for USA’s The Purge TV series is here, and if it looks and sounds like this small screen follow-up to the film series is re-treading some familiar territory, that’s because it is. Consider how many times we’ve heard some version of this line: “If people have a legal way of getting rid of their anger and rage, crime will go down.” The new trailer also features voiceover people droning on about patriotism and how choosing to become a stone-cold killer for one night is really about love of country and freedom. (Insert eye roll here.) Yeah, yeah, we got it.

Apart from an apparent subplot about a girl being brainwashed into sacrificing herself to some guy in a Grim Reaper get-up — meaning, we might be going down some cult wormhole that could be fun — a lot of the hows and whys are just repeats here.

The biggest difference, though, is that there seems to be more of a focus on simply scaring everybody for entertainment’s sake, which, if that’s where this is going, it’s actually really good news.

The Purge TV series, USA Network

James DeMonaco didn’t intend his Purge film series to become such a timely metaphor for increasing incivility in America. He was inspired by his own brush with severe road rage, and his story of government-authorized violence started coming together from there. What started out as a relatively mature framework surrounding an otherwise simple home invasion movie became an outright condemnation of cultural calamities, though, tackling issues like extreme economic inequality, religious zealotry, and wide desensitivity to violence.

It’s been shockingly on-the-nose ever since, to the point that Election Year even foretold Donald Trump’s campaign slogan. The films have not-so-nicely paralleled the ugly underbelly of modern society, from a penchant for violence to the current struggles with racism and class warfare to a misplaced sense of nationalism that somehow justifies it all.

That messaging culminated in this summer’s The First Purge, which went and just laid bare the origins of the title terror tradition: the whole concept was formulated by the “New Founding Fathers of America” to gradually eliminate poor people.

So, at this point, there’s little else to say about why The Purge happened or how high society seized upon the concept to punish the less fortunate among us. The four films to predate the TV series have already explored those plot points in excruciating detail, even book-ending this fictional phenomenon from its very first occurrence to its very last with few stones left unturned.

The Purge TV series does sound like it pays some lip service to everything that came before it, as a means of establishment, but otherwise, it looks to follow some unexpecting victims through the trials and tribulations of a Purge Night set somewhere in between the events of The First Purge and the first Purge film.

DeMonaco himself has confirmed that the 10-episode series is meant to highlight the humanity behind those involved in the carnage — you know, just before they grab all the machetes and shotguns and start doing their worst to one another.

“We flashback out of the Purge world, into the regular lives, the non-Purge days, of this future America. We get to see who these people are when it’s not Purge Night and the events that led them to where they are on the particular Purge night that we are following,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “The TV show … allows us to truly analyze why anyone would pick up a gun or a knife to solve a problem.”

The Purge TV series, USA Network

In other words, we’re about to follow individual people as they go ham over everyday frustrations and proceed to maim each other in the streets because the government says it’s fine. From that creepy carnival scene to whatever’s happening at the fancy dinner party to those unfortunate office workers who are forced to work through the night by their liquored-up boss, the show seems to be introducing new scenarios of people trying to survive the night. Rather than hashing out yet another teachable moment about the house that built The Purge, it’s just going to entertain us with some slasher action.

At this point, we don’t need The Purge TV series to be expository to be entertaining, and from the looks of this teaser, it looks like they get it. Again.

The Purge debuts on USA Network September 4th.