Hulu’s partnership with author Margaret Atwood is expanding as Deadline reportsthat the streaming service has tapped Michael Leslie to develop MaddAddam, a new series based upon Atwood’s dystopian trilogy that includes her novels Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam.
Leslie, who previously developed The Little Drummer Girl for AMC, will develop the series by writing the pilot and serving as an executive producer alongside Atwood. However, this also means Leslie is exiting the Battlestar Galactica reboot for NBC’s Peacock that was announced last year, leaving the sci-fi reboot once again in limbo.
The MaddAddam trilogy follows “the events leading up to the near destruction of mankind and civilization by a malicious bioengineered pandemic. The catalyst for it all is Crake, a brilliant and complicated young man so disturbed by the injustices of the world that he spends his young life developing a virus that will wipe out humans and replace us with a new species of hominid. The series not only looks at the events that lead up to that big moment, referred to in the books as the “waterless flood,” but also what happens after — including who and what shall inherit the earth.”
Hulu has been working with Atwood for the last several years on the series adaptation of her classic novel The Handmaid’s Tale. The fourth season is set to premiere in April and has already been renewed for a fifth while Hulu is working with MGM to develop The Testaments, the sequel to Atwood’s novel, as a series.
Producing MaddAddam will be Paramount Television Studios, Anonymous Content and Makemake Entertainment.
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