'The Purge' TV Show Trailer Brutally Makes America Great

The dystopian alternate American of The Purge series seems less and less farfetched by the day, which might explain why there’s going to be another Purge movie and a 10-episode TV show coming out this year. The first trailer for The Purge, set to debut on USA Network this fall, looks to be every bit as brutal and political as the horror franchise’s film installments.

The trailer, which Blumhouse Television and Universal Cable Productions unveiled on Thursday, is ominous and stressful. The one percent celebrate before the state-sanctioned slaughter begins, and there are violent flashes of people getting dragged behind cars, attacked by men wearing George W. Bush and Bill Clinton masks, and engaging in cult-like activity.

“Tonight, we celebrate because we made this country great,” a woman says to an assembled crowd of wealthy, soon-to-be purgers. It’s a sly nod to President Donald Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again,” a phrase that the upcoming movie The First Purge has also embraced to satirical ends.

The official synopsis explains that the series is “set in an altered America ruled by a totalitarian political party,” and that it will follow “several seemingly unrelated characters living in a small city.”

That ensemble cast of characters makes it a little hard to tell which scenes in the trailer are directly related to one another, as it’s unclear how much the various characters’ plots will intertwine, but it appears as though a busload of victims are being bused somewhere. Perhaps they’re prey for the ultra-rich we see earlier in the trailer. If that’s the case, the rich aren’t even hunting with any pretense of sport. It’s like hunting captive quail that have been brought out just to die. It wouldn’t be the first time that a person has been shot in the face while quail hunting.

Inverse is currently on the set of The Purge TV show — follow along on Twitter.

The Purge premieres on September 4 at 10 p.m. Eastern on USA Network.