IP Picks🔎: A Granny Crime Boss Seeks Revenge
âž• Estranged sisters bond while hiding a dead body and America's top pet lawyer
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
I burned through The Perfect Couple and Rebel Ridge over the weekend. I wasn’t the only one apparently. They are, respectively, the most popular TV series and movie on Netflix right now. I enjoyed the hell out of both, especially Rebel Ridge, which offered a fresh spin on the whole stranger-rides-into-corrupt-town trope.
I'm not surprised that audiences have responded to both of them. I've been flagging stories like these two pretty regularly. With Rebel, The Optionist has recommended titles with similar settings, Black protagonists and vigilante heroes. As for Couple, I've highlighted wealthy wedding murder plots, rich people behaving badly and good old-fashioned murder. I even flagged a true story that takes place in an idyllic Maine vacation town.
That's just rattling off a few recent examples that immediately spring to mind. Look through our past newsletters and you'll find even more. At the risk of sounding boastful, I think this is a place where The Optionist excels: Offering smart, commercial genre stories attuned to what broad audiences want to see on the big and small screens.
That's why I always say give the Optionist a year — hell, give it six months — and I know you'll discover your next project.
A few months back, I highlighted “Kushtuka," a fantastic horror short by Mathilda Zeller that was in an anthology of Indigenous tales of terror. The story is about a monster out of Inuit mythology that stalks a young First Nations girl and the group of white men she's traveling with in the backcountry. Back then, Zeller had plans to expand the story into a book. Well, now she’s landed a deal for it following a six-way bidding war. I’m looking forward to seeing what the expanded version looks like. A full manuscript will be ready soon (Joe Veltre at Gersh reps it if you’re interested).
Now, on to this week’s picks. We’ve got two feel-good stories bookending a trio of powerful and harrowing crime dramas.
The full lineup:
A mystery/family dramedy that finds three estranged sisters bonding while they attempt to hide a dead body
A crime drama centered on the matriarch of a small-town criminal gang seeking revenge for her daughter’s death
A courtroom procedural about a third-rate lawyer who has to rise to the occasion when a simple oddball robbery turns into a double-murder trial
A family drama about a woman’s search for answers about what her parents and family members knew about a relative who sexually assaulted her older sister when they were kids
A feel-good procedural about the country’s foremost pet lawyer
