After the massive success of GET OUT, Jordan Peele can pretty much do whatever he wants, and it seems that he's keen to get back into the television game. Deadline reports that Jordan Peele's Monkeypaw Productions will be teaming with Bad Robot and Warner Bros. Television for Lovecraft Country, a one-hour drama which has already been given a straight-to-series order by HBO.
The upcoming series will be based on Matt Ruff's novel of the same name and follow twenty-five year old Atticus Black as he embarks on a road trip across 1950's Jim Crow America to find his father after he goes missing. "Black joins up with his friend Letitia and his Uncle George [and] this begins a struggle to survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and the malevolent spirits that could be ripped from a Lovecraft paperback." That sounds mighty promising to me, and Deadline states that the goal is to create a "anthological horror series that reclaims genre storytelling from the African-American perspective."
Jordan Peele knew that "Lovecraft Country" had the "potential to be unlike anything else on television" when he first read it, and soon brought the project to the attention of Misha Green, the creator of WGN America's Underground. Green will be penning the pilot episode as well as serving as show-runner, with Jordan Peele stepping in as executive producer along with J.J. Abrams, Ben Stephenson and Green.
A synopsis of "Lovecraft Country" via Amazon:
Chicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, 22-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George—publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide—and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Mr. Braithwhite—heir to the estate that owned one of Atticus’s ancestors—they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours.
At the manor, Atticus discovers his father in chains, held prisoner by a secret cabal named the Order of the Ancient Dawn—led by Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb—which has gathered to orchestrate a ritual that shockingly centers on Atticus. And his one hope of salvation may be the seed of his—and the whole Turner clan’s—destruction.
As for Jordan Peele's next big-screen project, it's still unclear what he intends on tackling next. His name was brought up as a possibility to direct the live-action adaptation of AKIRA, but Peele recently said that he likely wouldn't take the gig as he would prefer to work with his own original ideas rather than pre-existing material. Can't argue with that. GET OUT will be released on Blu-ray/DVD on May 23rd.