<\/p>\n
Dublin-based \u201cIrish Blood\u201d producers Deadpan Pictures and\u00a0Canadian shingle\u00a0Shaftesbury Films\u00a0are teaming up again on \u201cThe Roaring Banshees,\u201d an adaptation of the hit play by John Morton and Peter McGann that follows an all-female band of Irish rebels who find themselves pursuing a life of crime in 1920s Chicago. The series is among the projects selected to take part in Rome\u2019s MIA Market, which runs Oct. 6 \u2013 10.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Roaring Banshees\u201d begins in Ireland, in the aftermath of\u00a0a failed assassination attempt on a powerful political kingpin by the secret rebel unit known as the Banshees. Forced to escape on an American-bound ship, the members are separated, only to reunite in Chicago in the frigid winter of 1923. Here, they plan to lie low and stay out of trouble until their former wartime commander negotiates their safe passage home \u2014 a plan that soon goes awry, making their return to Ireland unlikely.<\/p>\n
More from Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Struggling to survive in Prohibition Chicago, with the police on their tail and an Irish assassin hot on their tracks, the women resort to crime, selling bootleg liquor to the Irish mob. But as their business grows, they attract trouble from brutal gangsters, corrupt cops and their own increasingly unpredictable natures, in what the series\u2019 creators describe as \u201ca classic rise-and-fall gangster story of immigrants staking their claim in the land of hope and glory.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking to\u00a0Variety<\/em>\u00a0ahead of the MIA Market, Deadpan Pictures co-founder Paul Donovan referenced series such as \u201cPeaky Blinders\u201d and \u201cBabylon Berlin\u201d when describing the appeal of \u201cThe Roaring Banshees.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a cinematic, visual, high-end, dramatic, classic gangster saga \u2014 but also entertaining and fun,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t take ourselves too seriously here. We\u2019re out to entertain.\u201d<\/p>\n Donovan recalled his first encounter with the play on which the series is based during a theater festival in Dublin. \u201cIt was a packed-out show, and it just had the audience laughing and crying and hooting and shouting and roaring on the characters,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The producer, who had previously collaborated with Morton on the Victorian-era Acorn TV period drama \u201cDead Still,\u201d praised the writer\u2019s work \u2014 \u201cIt always inherently had humor and entertainment in it,\u201d he said \u2014 and immediately recognized the source material\u2019s potential for adaptation.<\/p>\n \u201cSo much of the action necessarily happened off-stage. It was explosions and shootouts and all sorts of great action sequences that they gave the impression of happening, but you didn\u2019t actually see them,\u201d he said. After the show, Donovan met with Morton and McGann to make his pitch, insisting those action set pieces would look \u201cfantastic\u201d on screen and telling the duo, \u201cLet\u2019s go make a big, brave, ambitious piece of fun, cinematic TV.\u201d<\/p>\n The series follows the rebel unit as they struggle to make a fresh start in America, \u201cout of their comfort zone\u201d and far from the cause they\u2019d spent their lives committed to, according to Donovan.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re a crack squad who fought in the war of independence in Ireland, and then they ended up on the wrong side in the Civil War thereafter. So they\u2019re quite fired up by a cause, and the justification for the kind of violence and mayhem that they engage in,\u201d said the producer.\u00a0\u201cBut things have changed, because they\u2019re not fighting this just cause anymore. They\u2019re no longer soldiers. They veer towards more of a gangster lifestyle, so it\u2019s more of gray moral world that they engage in.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat kind of muddy area,\u201d he added, \u201cis fertile ground for drama.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Roaring Banshees\u201d is written by Morton and McGann and directed by Neasa Hardiman, whose credits include the Netflix series \u201cUntamed\u201d and \u201cJessica Jones,\u201d and the Hulu drama \u201cWe Were the Lucky Ones.\u201d The 8 x 60\u2019 series will be shot in Ireland and Hamilton, Ontario, which Donovan described as a convincing stand-in for 1920s Chicago.<\/p>\n Deadpan Pictures and\u00a0Toronto-based production outfit\u00a0Shaftesbury Films previously teamed up on \u201cIrish Blood,\u201d Acorn TV\u2019s mystery-drama series starring Alicia Silverstone that was recently renewed for a second season.<\/p>\n \u201cBetween the two of us, we can bring up to 45% of the finance to the table,\u201d said Donovan. \u201cThere\u2019s an established relationship there, and the Irish-Canadian co-production does work really well between the different funding sources. For MIA, our challenge now is to get partners on board for the rest of the funding.\u201d<\/p>\n Rome\u2019s MIA Market runs Oct. 6 \u2013 10.<\/p>\n Best of Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dublin-based \u201cIrish Blood\u201d producers Deadpan Pictures and\u00a0Canadian shingle\u00a0Shaftesbury Films\u00a0are teaming up again on \u201cThe Roaring Banshees,\u201d an adaptation of the hit play by John Morton and Peter McGann that follows an all-female band of Irish rebels who find themselves pursuing a life of crime in 1920s Chicago. The series is among the projects selected to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2074192,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[389157,308694,389155,306173,364412,389153,389159,389154,389156,389158],"class_list":["post-2074191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-banshees","tag-chicago","tag-deadpan-pictures","tag-ireland","tag-irish-blood","tag-john-morton","tag-mia-market","tag-paul-donovan","tag-peter-mcgann","tag-shaftesbury-films"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\u2018The-Roaring-Banshees-Producers-Tease-\u2018Big-Brave-Ambitious-Gangland-Series.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2074191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2074191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2074191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2074193,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2074191\/revisions\/2074193"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2074192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2074191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2074191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2074191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}