Maniac Showrunner to Bring Best-Sellers Made for Love, Station Eleven to WarnerMedia’s Streamer

By Christine Fernando  |  June 26, 2019 | 12:18pm
Images via HarperCollins, Frazer Harrison/Getty, Penguin Random House
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Maniac Showrunner to Bring Best-Sellers Made for Love, Station Eleven to WarnerMedia’s Streamer

Maniac showrunner Patrick Somerville is adapting not one, but two best-sellers into TV series for WarnerMedia’s forthcoming streaming service.

The two uber-successful novels, Made for Love and Station Eleven, will each be transformed into 10-episode limited series, with Somerville serving as showrunner on both, WarnerMedia announced Tuesday.

For Made for Love, Somerville is teaming up with director and EP S.J. Clarkson, best-known for her 2010 biographical comedy-drama Toast and the British romantic drama series Mistresses.

The Somerville-Clarkson duo will adapt Alissa Nutting’s tragicomic novel of the same name. The story follows a 30-something woman named Hazel Green as she flees from a suffocating 10-year marriage to a sociopath tech billionaire. But to her dismay, she discovers that her husband has implanted a monitoring device, called Made for Love, in her brain. Now, he can track her, watch her and know her innermost thoughts and feelings, all while she struggles to stay alive.

“A dark, absurd, and cynically poignant story of divorce and revenge, this series shows how far some will go for love, and how much further others will go to destroy it,” WarnerMedia’s announcement explains.

Nutting herself will executive produce the Paramount Studios project alongside Liza Chasin and Dean Bakopoulos.

In a similarly thrilling vein, Station Eleven is a more post-apocalyptic saga that spans multiple timelines. The novel and its forthcoming series adaptation let us peer in at the survivors of a deadly flu as they rebuild their world and reflect on what they’ve lost.

Sounds like a pretty typical dystopian sort of disaster story, but the novel by Emily St. John Mandel was an international smash-hit, and a finalist for a National Book Award and a PEN/Faulkner Award. Safe to say it’s a cut above most dystopian, young adult fodder.

The great Hiro Murai (Atlanta) has signed on as director and EP for Station Eleven. He’s best-known for directing Childish Gambino’s iconic “This is America” music video, the artist’s origin story in 2019’s Guava Island and 2013’s star-studded short Clapping for the Wrong Reasons, which was penned by Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino).

Also under Paramount Studios, Somerville and Murai will executive produce the Station Eleven adaptation along with Scott Steindorff, Scott Delman and Dylan Russell.

If you want to check out Somerville’s work ahead of his two new releases, Somerville most recently created, wrote, executive produced and served as showrunner for the critically acclaimed Netflix drama series Maniac. He’s also written and produced for the essential HBO drama The Leftovers.

No word yet on when WarnerMedia will launch the streaming service that’s set to host Made for Love and Station Eleven, but the service has already drawn up a pretty impressive slate of new content, including the Paul Feig-led anthology show Love Life starring Anna Kendrick, a Dune sequel series from Denis Villeneuve and a drama starring Ansel Elgort called Tokyo Vice.

 
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