IP Picks🔎: A True-Crime Tragedy That Blends ‘Adolescence’ & ‘Big Little Lies’

➕ A strange Western, a vampire thriller and more MAGA idiocy over ‘The Odyssey’

FAMILY CRISIS Christine Tremarco and Stephen Graham on Netflix’s Adolescence. (Ankler illustration; Netflix)

Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along with me.

The hiring of former Tinder CEO Faye Iosotaluno as president and COO in a newly created role at Fourth Wave publisher Entangled is an interesting executive move. It comes six months or so after The Chernin Group took an equity stake in the company at a $400 million valuation. It’s another signal that the 15-year-old company has ambitions to ride the romantasy wave to become a diversified media conglomerate.

Its film and television development arm, Premeditated Pictures, just extended its first-look deal with Amazon MGM Studios for another five years to 2032. It has already set up more than a dozen projects under the deal, most notably an adaptation of Fourth Wing with Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society.

It has also spun up new imprints aimed at younger readers — one targeted at older middle schoolers and another positioned for early high schoolers — and has been a leader in offering higher-margin collectible editions of its most popular books. I suspect that they’ll move even more into merchandise and other ancillary products.

As the announcement suggests, hiring a former Tinder CEO is both an effort to reinforce and serve a durable fan community and to continue to cultivate its strongly female audience. Entangled cofounder and CEO, Liz Pelletier, said Iosotaluno “is exactly the kind of leader this moment demands. She has a remarkable ability to turn passionate audiences into thriving communities, and she’ll help us create new opportunities for authors while giving readers even more ways to engage with the stories they love.”

Iosotaluno added that Entangled isn’t just a publisher but “a community of the most coveted audience in entertainment: passionate women who show up, engage, and evangelize.”

There’s gonna be skepticism about this, a sense that romantasy is a passing fad. (Female audiences are often undervalued.) I’m more optimistic. I think this audience is durable and passionate. Tastes will shift a bit over time, but if Entangled can continue to have its finger on the audience’s pulse, it can thrive. Navigating the book-to-screen process consistently at a high level is hard, and success in publishing doesn’t always translate to the screen. Still, I think the model for what Entangled could become over the next decade if it navigates these challenges well is Marvel.

I have so little patience for these MAGA tech bros, with their twisted fantasies about what Ancient Greece was like, going after Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. There was the manufactured outrage from this crew over casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, which was both racist and stupid. Then it was about casting Elliot Page, a trans man, in a role.

Now it’s more phony nonsense — this time aimed at the 2017 translation of The Odyssey written by Emily Wilson for being… what? Too readable? Get a life, people.

First, I read this translation of The Odyssey, and it is fantastic — very accessible and easy to read (in the best way possible). I’ve been pitching it as a great summer read to friends. Second, what I love about this Q&A with Wilson, a Classics professor at Penn, is that she has no fucks to give for those critics: “The people who are getting angry haven’t spent years studying Homeric Greek. There are people who have conspiratorial ideas about how professionals don’t know anything: ‘Here’s this Ivy League professor; she obviously doesn’t know as much as me and I did my own research.’”

This week: A true-crime tragedy that could be the next Adolescence, a very weird Western and a female-centered thriller

A note: The decline of magazines and newspapers has been a crisis for longform journalism — especially at newspapers. They just don’t have the resources to devote to this kind of reporting anymore. Heck, they barely have the resources to do the meat-and-potatoes reporting on what’s going on at City Hall. Sometimes my weeks are frustrating, as I’m endlessly hunting for a good longform story to feature, which is why, when I stumble on a mostly overlooked gem in a regional paper like one in today’s issue, it makes my week.

🔒The full lineup for paid subscribers:

🕵🏻 A female-centered action thriller with a dose of The Flight Attendant’s attitude that’s a perfect vehicle for someone like Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

🗡🔮 An atmospheric thriller from a bestselling author about the modern-day hunt for a vampire that’s perfect for development as a limited series.

⌛ A Last of Us meets True Grit in a tale that is an Old West-set weird western.

🪖 Band of Brothers meets Rogue Heroes in the limited-series-ready incredible true story of America’s most decorated WWII spy. 󠁖

🏃💥🚕 A series-ready true-crime story in the vein of Adolescence about a suburban tragedy involving a dead teen and thorny questions about parental and community responsibility.