HBO Developing Drama on Race For COVID-19 Vaccine
Written by SOURCE on July 28, 2020
The search for that which could make the world normal again (see: vaccine, coronavirus) is being made into a limited-series drama for HBO, according to Deadline. The premium cable company also tapped Adam McKay‘s production house (and, by extension, Adam McKay) to handle the project.
Deadline adds that HBO has optioned writer Brendan Borrell’s non-fiction narrative book, The First Shot, as the basis for the series. That book, which is obviously still being worked on (you didn’t somehow miss major news of a completed vaccine) is set to tell the story of the “global coronavirus vaccine race.” Borrell further writes on his website that it’ll be about “the companies that are risking all to win it, the fascinating and sometimes surprising science that it is based on, and the challenges playing out around access and safety.”
At the moment, the working title for reasons of the crystal clear variety is Untitled Vaccine Project. It will be produced by McKay’s Hyperobject Industries. Borrell and McKay will be executive producers, as will Todd Schulman.
As one would expect from somebody writing a book about it, Borrell has been closely monitoring the search for a vaccine, with articles published in Wired, Science Magazine, and National Geographic. He has also covered rare genetic diseases for The New York Times, and written for The Atlantic about “Australia’s flesh-eating bacteria problem,” according to Deadline.
As for McKay, he launched Hyperobject Industries in 2019, and struck a five-year, first-look TV deal with HBO in October of that year. His first project related to that deal was a(nother) limited series based upon Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown’s on-the-way-book on Jeffrey Epstein.
In December, he had a drama project about the L.A. Lakers ordered to series. That had been going by Showtime, and was also based on a non-fiction book, specifically Jeff Pearlman’s Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s. John C. Reilly is set to play Jerry Buss in that.
McKay’s also working with Parasite’s Bong Joon Ho to turn that Best Picture winner into a TV series. And he’s putting together a climate change anthology series for HBO Max called The Uninhabitable Earth.
