Variety is reporting that NBC have given a straight-to-series order for comedy series The Young Rock, which is based on the childhood of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.
The series is said to chronicle Johnson’s “formative years”, in which he would spend his High School years in Honolulu before moving the country music capital of Nashville, Tennessee, where he was arrested multiple times for fighting, theft and check fraud before the age of seventeen. It was revealed that Johnson will appear in every episode of the show.
Speaking via video at Winter TCA press tour, Dwayne Johnson had this to say about the premise of the series:
We’re going to find young Rock wreaking havoc in the streets of Hawaii, when I was a teenager, getting arrested seemingly every single week, doing things I shouldn’t have been doing, but still a good kid. Then we got evicted off the island, and moved to, of all places Nashville, Tennessee, where I continued to get in trouble. Just imagine me at 15 in downtown Nashville, listening to honky tonk, buying my first car from a crackhead for $70 – I did talk him down so I was a pretty good negotiator. Then we go into high school years and then I became University of Miami football star, if you will, until I got beat out of my position by a guy by the name of Warren Sapp, who went on to become one of the greatest defensive tackles of all time.
He also talked about how the project was pitched to NBC, saying:
When we pitched the show to our friends at NBC, at the end of the pitch, all jaws were dropped and all hands were raised and they said ‘we are in 100%, you’re not allowed to pitch this anywhere else
The series is being developed by Nahnatchka Khan, and will co-write the pilot with Jeff Chiang. The duo will also executive produce alongside Johnson under the Seven Bucks Productions banner, Dany Garcia, Hiram Garcia, Brian Gewirtz and Jennifer Carreras of Fierce Baby Productions.
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