Oz and The Wire creators pen Lincoln miniseries for HBO

Pleased that it could turn the story of a curmudgeonly political stalwart into the year’s hottest miniseries with John Adams, HBO is sizing up the search for Abraham Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth as a new miniseries. And they’re getting right to it: The network has brought on veterans David Simon and Tom Fontana to write and produce.

Details on the series are limited while it’s in development, but the production would be an adaptation of James L. Swanson’s book Manhunt, just as John Adams followed the bestselling biography of the same name by David McCullough.

That series, which also found a sizable audience on DVD (and, apparently, with Emmy voters), starred Paul Giamatti as the titular character in a sprawling, decade-spanning portrait of the second U.S. president. Manhunt would have a much narrower focus, the hidden complexities behind the 12-day search for Booth, exactly the kind of material on which Simon thrives.

Fontana, for his part, previously helped Simon adapt a book into the influential ’90s cop drama Homicide. Both men also have earlier connections to HBO: Simon, of course, just wrapped up his intensely admired series The Wire for the network, and Fontana is the creator of Oz, the raw prison drama that ran from 1997 to 2003.  

The series joins Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming biopic Lincoln, which will take a broader view of its subject and looks likely to hit the zeitgeist right around the same time as Manhunt.

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