Batman’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth, is getting his own TV show. The prequel series Pennyworth is being made by Bruno Heller and Danny Cannon of Gotham, and now they’ve explained their reasoning…

As Heller explains in an interview with Collider: “It was a combination of charms and blessings that we had this wonderful character. We both wanted to work in England, and the DC universe has got lots of wonderful superhuman, superheroic characters. There are very few real people that have iconic status, and Alfred Pennyworth is one of them. The really attractive thing about it is that he’s an underutilized and under spoken of character. He’s someone who’s been in the frame, but never really looked at. Because of his age, we could leap back into the past and tell a completely fresh origin story for a character that everyone knows.”

Cannon added this: “His age was key because I don’t think there’s been a DC show that’s gone back into the past and been at a different period. The world that could be created, because it had to be a DC version of them, plus the fact that you have a young man, leaving the war and re-entering society, everything just turned us on quickly.”

Jack Bannon – who you may have seen in The Imitation Game – has signed up for the title role, and you can get your best look yet at his performance as Alfred in the trailer below.

You can watch the Pennyworth trailer here…

And here’s the teaser that preceded it…

Also, here’s that poster…

Paloma Faith, Jason Flemyng, Ryan Fletcher, Hainsley Lloyd Bennett, Emma Paetz and Polly Walker join Jack Bannon in the Pennyworth cast.

Here’s the official synopsis for the show…

“From Warner Horizon Scripted Television, DC origin story Pennyworth is a ten-episode, one-hour drama series based on DC characters created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger. It follows Bruce Wayne’s legendary butler, Alfred Pennyworth (Jack Bannon), a former British SAS soldier who forms a security company and goes to work with Thomas Wayne (Ben Aldridge), Bruce’s billionaire father, in 1960’s London.”

Pennyworth is headed to American network Epix, where it will premiere on 28 July. For UK audiences, it will broadcast on Amazon Prime video through the StarzPlay add-on, but we don’t have the exact UK premiere date yet. We’ll keep you posted…