The history of a Halo adaptation is rife with stops and starts, but it seems as if Showtime is finally going to bring the popular video game to the small screen – and they’ve hired a second showrunner to do it.

Steven Kane (TNT’s The Last Ship) is joining original showrunner Kyle Killen to tackle the premium channel’s “most ambitious series ever,” and you can read on to learn why this show requires two people to lead the charge.



According to The Hollywood Reporter, Steven Kane (The Last Ship, American Dad, The Closer) has come on board as the second Halo showrunner. The report says original showrunner Kyle Killen (The Beaver, Lone Star, Awake) “wanted to focus on the big-budget drama’s stateside production — including writing and producing” and he needed a co-showrunner who could spend most of a year in Budapest, Hungary, where the primary filming is going to take place. Kane will fill that role.

Several popular shows have had multiple showrunners, including Game of Thrones (David Benioff and D.B. Weiss) and LOST (Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse), so bringing on a second person isn’t an unusual step; in fact, Lindelof hired Cuse on LOST to help lighten the load in the second season.

Here’s the official description of the show:

In its adaptation for Showtime, HALO will take place in the universe that first came to be in 2001, dramatizing an epic 26th-century conflict between humanity and an alien threat known as the Covenant. HALO will weave deeply drawn personal stories with action, adventure and a richly imagined vision of the future.

We know the series won’t be a direct adaptation of the games, but it will star Master Chief, the mysterious helmet-wearing protagonist that players control in the video game war against the Covenant. The show’s initial 10-episode season order has since been dropped to nine episodes in the wake of some behind-the-scenes troubles. Director Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Captive State) was originally on board to executive produce the show and direct multiple episodes, but he ended up leaving because the scope of the show became so large that it would have required him to devote too much time to it – “some months if not years,” he said in an interview. Ultimately, Black Mirror and Robin Hood helmer Otto Bathurst stepped in to take over as one of the show’s directors. Production was originally slated to begin sometime this year.