Sex Pistols TV Series ‘Pistol’ Will Premiere in May
The upcoming TV series about Sex Pistols is set to air on Hulu in the U.S. on May 31.
Pistol, which was produced by FX Networks and directed by Danny Boyle, will also be available on Disney+ in the U.K., Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore (via Deadline).
"The Pistols were the fountainhead that changed [society.] They gave a sense of timelessness. Nothing ever seemed to be the same again," Boyle said in a Twitter thread posted by FX Networks. "What was different about [the Sex Pistols] is that they said you can do whatever the f you want with it. That is proper counterculture. They gave a sense of timelessness.”
Based on guitarist Steve Jones' 2017 memoir Lonely Boy: Tales From a Sex Pistol, the TV series, which was co-produced by Jones, documents the turbulent rise of the band as it evolved from a scrappy local London group to one of the world's most influential punk icons. As the series' official logline describes, "This is the story of a band of spotty, noisy, working-class kids with 'no future,' who shook the boring, corrupt establishment to its core, threatened to bring down the government and changed music and culture forever.”
Toby Wallace stars as Jones in Pistol, backed by Anson Boon as singer Johnny Rotten (nee Lydon), Christian Lees as first bassist Glen Matlock, Louis Partridge as later bassist Sid Vicious, Jacob Slater as drummer Paul Cook, Sydney Chandler as Pretenders leader Chrissie Hynde, Emma Appleton as Vicious' girlfriend Nancy Spungen and Thomas Brodie-Sangster as band manager Malcolm McLaren.
Lydon recently lost a court case in which he argued that he wasn't consulted on the content of the series, but a court ruled that the remaining surviving band members were within their rights based on the group's democratic voting system. “There's nothing really to argue about," Lydon told Yahoo! "If they want to trash the legend of the Sex Pistols, it seems that that's exactly what they're going to go and do."