Jensen Ackles will play Lucas Davenport for MGM+, the third actor in the role and the first to start at book one
A detective invented in 1989 has been on screen twice, both times as a one-off television film, and both times starting somewhere in the middle of a thirty-five-book shelf. The third attempt goes back to the first page, runs eight episodes, and starts shooting in Toronto within weeks.
MGM+ has ordered eight episodes of Rules of Prey and handed the lead to Jensen Ackles, who will also executive produce. Filming starts this month in Toronto, and Deadline had the order first. The character he is taking on has been played twice before, by two other actors, on two other networks.
Lucas Davenport is the detective at the centre of John Sandford's Prey novels — thirty-five of them since 1989, one of the longest-running crime series still in print. The show adapts the first book, which is also called Rules of Prey, and that is the part nobody has done yet.
Two Davenports came before him
Neither previous attempt started at the beginning. Eriq LaSalle played Davenport in an ABC film of Mind Prey. Mark Harmon played him in Certain Prey for USA in 2011, three years before he became synonymous with a different television investigator entirely. Both were single television movies, adapted from books well down the sequence. This is the first time anyone has gone back to book one and built a series out of it.
The premise stays close to Sandford: Davenport, pushed out of the Minneapolis Police Department for refusing to let the law obstruct justice, is drawn back in when a serial killer starts leaving murders addressed specifically to him. His methods are the reason he lost the badge in the first place.
Davenport is described in the series documents as a "righteous avenging angel" — a brilliant polymath with an unconventional approach and an unwillingness to let the law get in the way of justice.
"Jensen Ackles' classic leading man charisma, combined with Bruce Terris' skillful adaptation of John Sandford's enduringly popular Prey series is an excellent fit for MGM+," said Michael Wright, global head of MGM+.
Three shows, one studio
The more useful number here is not eight episodes but three series. Ackles is currently carrying:
- Vought Rising — the Boys prequel, where he stars as Soldier Boy and produces. Premieres 2027.
- Tracker — he returns as Russell Shaw in CBS's fourth season.
- Rules of Prey — lead and executive producer, shooting from this month.
- Before these, The Boys and the thriller Countdown ran at the same time, and he headlined and produced the second one.
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Two of those three sit inside Amazon MGM Studios, which owns both MGM+ and MGM Television, and Deadline called him that studio's MVP in the first line of its story. The pattern is not new for him, but doing it as a producer on two of the three is.
Who is actually making it
Bruce Terris created the series and runs it, arriving straight off an Emmy for DTF St. Louis. Daniel Sackheim, whose credits run through Game of Thrones, True Detective, Ozark and Better Call Saul, directs the first two episodes. Sandford himself is a co-producer — he is the pseudonym of John Camp, who won a Pulitzer as a newspaper journalist before he wrote a word of fiction.
MGM+ will premiere it in the United States, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Chile. No date has been given, which is what you would expect from a production that has not shot a frame yet.
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