Quentin Tarantino's Unpredictable, Weird History With Television

After announcing his imminent retirement, working on a (now-canceled) R-rated Star Trek movie, and penning the novelization for his own Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there’s almost nothing Quentin Tarantino could do to surprise us at this point – beyond perhaps revealing that the Pulp Fiction briefcase was actually full of love, the greatest treasure on Earth. But now we’ve learned that Tarantino is “in talks” to direct two episodes of the upcoming Justified revival. 

This is great news for a lot of reasons, not least of which being that Justified was based on the novels of Elmore Leonard, and the last time Tarantino played within the Leonard-verse it resulted in arguably his greatest movie …

This wouldn’t be the first time Tarantino has worked in television, far from it. But the famous director’s TV résumé is wildly eclectic; there was the time he appeared on an episode of The Golden Girls as an Elvis impersonator. And even in a sea of 1980s Elvis impersonators, he’s still somehow overacting. 

And most notably, there’s his directing work on network dramas, including an early episode of ER, arranged by his From Dusk Til Dawn co-star George Clooney, which coincidentally involved a criminal with a severed ear. He also helmed a two-hour episode of one of his favorite shows: CSI.

Weirder still, he supposedly “guest directed” an episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, although that was seemingly just a publicity stunt. If the Justified gig comes through, possibly that will pave the way for Tarantino’s own Western TV series; he’s written several scripts of the fictional Bounty Law show from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which he actually wants to produce – presumably after airdropping cartons of cigarettes across the country so we can all watch it in an authentic 1960s smoke haze. 

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Top Image: Miramax Films/CBS Television Studios