Supernatural fans have watched Jensen Ackles build a compelling post-Dean Winchester career, and every new project he attaches himself to seems more compelling than the last.
He has starred in The Boys, Tracker, and the upcoming Vought Rising. Now he is set to play Lucas Davenport, one of the great protagonists in American crime fiction, in a long-running series that has been waiting three decades for a truly definitive screen adaptation.
John Sandford’s Rules of Prey is officially getting an adaptation and production started in Toronto this month. I did not expect to be this excited about this announcement, and yet here we are.
MGM+ has greenlit Rules of Prey, an eight-episode drama series starring and executive produced by Jensen Ackles, based on the first book in John Sandford’s beloved Prey series. Created by Bruce Terris, who serves as showrunner and executive producer, the series will premiere on MGM+ across the U.S., UK, and other regions.
Who Is John Sandford?
John Sandford, the pen name of John Roswell Camp, is one of America’s most successful crime fiction authors. Born in 1944 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Camp studied history, literature, and journalism at the University of Iowa before working as a reporter for the Miami Herald and later the Saint Paul Pioneer Press.
His journalism earned top honors, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his series on a Minnesota farm family during the Midwest farm crisis.
In 1989, he shifted to fiction, publishing The Fool’s Run under his real name and Rules of Prey as John Sandford. The Prey series, featuring Lucas Davenport, became a runaway success and now spans 36 novels, all New York Times bestsellers.
What Is Rules of Prey TV Series About?
Published in 1989, Rules of Prey introduces Lucas Davenport and establishes the template for one of the longest-running and most satisfying crime series in American fiction.
The official series logline captures the central setup:
Rules of Prey follows Lucas Davenport, formerly a detective in the Minneapolis Police Department, drawn out of seclusion back into law enforcement to investigate a series of confounding murders designed to send a message specifically to him. When an ingenious serial killer begins murdering Minneapolis citizens, Davenport, a brilliant polymath and unconventional investigator, takes the case, sparking an intense psychological duel with an equally intelligent adversary. As Davenport deciphers the killer’s twisted moral code and personal vendetta, he must match wits with a predator operating by his own rules of justice, risking everything to stop a killer who sees their conflict as the ultimate game.
The killer in the novel calls himself the “maddog” and has been murdering Minneapolis women with what appears to be no pattern or motive.
The crimes are linked only by their brutality and by the killer’s calling card: at each scene, he leaves a written rule of crime. Rules like “never kill anyone you know” and “never carry a weapon after it has been used.” He is constructing his own ethical framework for murder, and he is extraordinarily careful.
Ackles plays Lucas Davenport as described in the official character notes: a righteous avenging angel whose sharp mind, unconventional approach, and unwillingness to let the law get in the way of justice forced him out of the Minneapolis Police Department.
That last detail is the interesting one. Davenport was not simply reassigned. They pushed him out because he operates outside the job’s conventional constraints. What brings him back is a killer who appears to be sending messages specifically to him.
This Is Not the First Davenport Adaptation
Rules of Prey is going to be adapted for the screen for the third time, but it is the first time it has had anything close to this level of production support behind it.
The seventh Prey novel, Mind Prey, was adapted as a 1999 TV movie starring Eriq La Salle as Lucas Davenport. Certain Prey, based on the tenth book in the series, followed as a 2011 TV movie with Mark Harmon in the role. Both were modest productions that never developed into ongoing series.
The MGM+ version is a different proposition entirely. Eight episodes, international distribution across eleven territories, a showrunner with strong genre credentials, and a star with genuine franchise momentum and a longstanding relationship with Amazon MGM Studios built through The Boys and Countdown.
The Creative Team
Bruce Terris, who created the series and serves as showrunner, previously served as a producer on DTF St. Louis. Daniel Sackheim, whose credits include Game of Thrones, will direct the first two episodes and executive produce, signaling the project’s visual ambition from the outset.
Executive producers alongside Ackles and Terris include Charles Gogolak and Matt Leipzig for Modern Literary Arts, Howard Braunstein, Michael Jaffe, John Requa, Glenn Ficarra, and John Weber.
John Sandford himself serves as a co-producer.
The Braunstein and Jaffe names are particularly worth noting: they are the same producers who brought the earlier Davenport TV movies to screen, meaning people committed to seeing this character done properly have been working toward this moment for a long time.
No premiere date has been confirmed. With production beginning in Toronto this month, a 2027 premiere date has been set!
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