Hit true crime podcast Serial is to turned into a television series by the directors of The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street films.
Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, who are also working on the Star Wars spin-off Han Solo film, and Fox 21 Television Studios have optioned the rights to global podcast phenomenon.
The critically-lauded weekly podcast captured the zeitgeist with almost 70m downloads of journalist Sarah Koenig’s investigation into the 1999 murder of high school student Hae Min Lee in Baltimore.
The cable television series will not dramatise the case of Adnan Syed, who was jailed for Hae’s murder, but will chronicle the making of the podcast as it follows a new case.
“Chris and Phil take an unexpected approach to telling stories and that is so appealing to us at Serial,” said Julie Snyder, who co-created and co-produced the podcast with Koenig. “They experiment. They don’t mimic formulas. Developing a show with them is exciting because we feel like we speak the same language, only they’re smarter than us.”
The team will begin pitching the project to cable TV networks once a writer, or team of writers, is put in place.
After debuting in October last year, Serial became the fastest podcast to hit 5m downloads in iTunes history and went on to win a Peabody Award.
Such was the success of Serial, a spin-off of National Public Radio’s This American Life programme, it has been commissioned for two more seasons.
The second season is tipped to investigate the mystery of Bowe Bergdahl, the army sergeant who left his base in Afghanistan under mysterious circumstances and was then captured by the Taliban.
In 2014, he was recovered by the US government in a swap for five Guantánamo Bay prisoners and charged with desertion. He currently faces life imprisonment.
In December, BBC Radio 4 Extra announced that it was to begin airing the weekly podcast.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion