Get Out’s Jordan Peele Already Has An Exciting New HBO Show Lined Up For You
Peele is back interrogating race relations in America.
Boy, does Hollywood love to reward the winners. Comedian, writer and director Jordan Peele (the auteur of this year’s biggest hit, allegorical horror film Get Out) has been inundated with job offers since his film turned out as a major hit with audiences and critics. Now he’s announced his next project: Lovecraft Country, a drama series about Jim Crow-era American horrors.
The series, on which Peele will serve as executive producer, will be co-produced with HBO and they’ve ordered the project straight-to-series with J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company. The pilot will be written by Underground‘s showrunner Misha Green, who will also serve as showrunner on this project.
The series is based on a 2016 novel of the same name by Mark Ruff, about a young man, Atticus Black, who sets out in Jim Crow-era America to find his missing father. The series will focus on a similar kind of genre storytelling to Get Out, which has been roundly praised for its clever approach to social and satirical horror.
Peele brought Ruff’s book to Bad Robot and enlisted Green as the pilot writer and showrunner, based on Green’s brilliant work on the critically acclaimed Underground. Green, who is “thrilled” to be assigned to the project, said in a statement, “Jordan, JJ, Bad Robot, Warner Bros and HBO are all in the business of pushing the limits when it comes to storytelling.”
It’s super exciting to see Peele returning to TV after his foray out into the big-screen world. Peele was, of course, one half of the brilliant and sorely missed sketch comedy duo Key & Peele. Key & Peele ran for five excellent seasons on Comedy Central before the duo left television to create their first feature film together, Keanu.
Like Get Out, Key & Peele was always known for its incisive observational humour when it came to the struggles of being a person of colour in the US. Many of the best sketches were centred on the escalating drama of race relations in America, including high rates of black incarceration, racist microaggressions, police brutality and the shooting of dozens of unarmed black men and women by police officers.
Looks like Lovecraft Country will be another clever and desperately necessary interrogation of race relations in the US from Peele’s clever brain.