Amazon will adapt William Gibson’s novel , reports. The show will be produced by a duo also responsible for on HBO.
Specifically, that means Jonathan Nolan (also a writer on the films and ) and Lisa Joy (also a writer for TV’s and ). Scott B. Smith will be a writer and executive producer for the series; he is best known for his Oscar-nominated screenplay for the Sam Raimi-directed film , released in 1998.
Published in 2014, takes place in two future timelines, both of them bleak. Among other things, it follows a woman who becomes a security guard in a virtual world but who begins to suspect that the virtual world is not so virtual after witnessing a murder-by-nanobots. Gibson is an acclaimed sci-fi author who also gave us the classics and and who coined the term “cyberspace.”
Last year, another Variety article reported that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was displeased with the lack of progress that Amazon’s original programming had seen compared to competitors like Netflix and HBO. He asked development executives at the company to find Amazon’s answer to . Then-studio-head Roy Price announced that Amazon would focus less on arthouse series and more on “big shows that can make the biggest difference around the world,” but he was not long afterwards forced out of his role in the wake of a sexual harassment claim.
In February, former NBC exec Jennifer Salke took up the studio head role. For a while, Amazon was aggressively seeking new ideas, such that it had an open script submission policy for new series, but that recently ended. The tech company also recently canceled , one of its early original series successes. That show very much fell into the arthouse category as compared to new efforts.
Along with this adaptation, Amazon is also working on a new series set in the Middle-earth universe of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
No premiere date has been announced for , but you can bet it will stream as part of Amazon’s Prime video lineup.
