While the highly anticipated second season of Westworld arrives this Sunday, creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan have set in motion a new project at Amazon. The duo found great success with one sci-fi adaptation, and are now focusing on another: William Gibson‘s 2014 novel, The Peripheral.
There was reportedly heavy competition for the series before Amazon won out and gave a script-to-series order. If all goes well with the script, The Peripheral will go straight to series, bypassing Amazon’s usual pilot process. Scott B. Smith (A Simple Plan) will write the script and also executive produce.
The show itself will likely revolve around female protagonist Flynne Fisher and male protagonist Wilf Netherton, with the former residing in rural America and the latter in a futuristic London around 70 years after Flynne’s time. Against all odds, these two are somehow destined to meet.
Joy and Nolan have brought frequent Westworld director Vincenzo Natali on board with them to direct the drama, and he has an executive producer credit as well.
Amazon have showed their intentions recently of crafting big budget, high-profile television to draw subscribers in. They spent a reported fortune on the rights to a Lord Of The Rings series, and another sci-fi show from the Westworld creators is a heavily marketable product that would likely generate plenty of interest.
The streaming giant now seems to be focusing on large-scale series, and gone are the days of greenlighting smaller shows such as I Love Dick and One Mississippi. We’ll wait and see if this change in strategy pays off for Amazon, but so far they’re hitching their wagon to content that has a good chance of drawing in a large demographic of viewers.
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