IP Picks🔎: A 'House'-like medical-mystery procedural
➕ The IRS agents who brought down a cartel and a YA whodunit in the world of teen TV
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
It’s a busy week everywhere — the upfronts, Cannes, the kickoff of summer movie season — so we’re going to move quickly into this week’s picks, which include two excellent longform pieces ripe for adaptation. As I’ve said before, I think the broader structural troubles in journalism have had a deleterious effect on the kind of in-depth stories that are well-suited for the screen, so it’s nice to have a pair of strong candidates this week.
Before we get there, just two small items. First, I wanted to flag reviews for two recently published books that we featured for their IP potential on the screen. In the NYT, reviewer Rachel Slade zeroed in on this part of Adam Higginbotham’s book about the Challenger disaster: “In Higginbotham’s deft hands, the human element — sometimes heroic, sometimes cloaked in doublespeak and bluster — shines through the many technical aspects of this story, a constant reminder that every decision was made by people weighing risks versus expediency, their minds distorted by power, money, politics and yes-men.”
Also in the NYT, Clyde Haberman had this to say about Steven Johnson’s The Infernal Machine: “This well-researched book . . . proceeds along dual tracks. One follows Goldman, Berkman and an array of other anarchists who may be unfamiliar to latter-day readers, including yet another Russia-born theorist, Peter Kropotkin. The other track limns the rise of a federal bureaucracy committed to beating back the perceived threat to order. As Johnson shows, the effort relied significantly on advances in police procedures that are now taken for granted but were nascent at the turn of the last century, be they fingerprinting, wiretapping or a more expansive concept of police professionalism. . . . We are taken skillfully through a stunning procession of horror, much of it barely remembered in the fog of more recent terrorist acts, none more devastating in our blood-soaked history than the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”
Item #2: I got a chance to preview the new Academy Museum exhibit on the role of Jews in the founding of Hollywood, “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” much of it inspired by Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own. It’s not huge, but it is very much worth checking out. There’s some compelling material as well as a very cool map that uses computer animation to chart the literal growth of Hollywood. I was impressed by the thought and high-end production values that went into creating it. I included Empire in one of my very first newsletters. It’s a sprawling, tricky story to adapt, but it’s full of larger-than-life characters. Somebody needs to take a swing at telling this epic as a series where you could really do it justice.
Onto this week’s picks:
A YA whodunit about a young actor who takes a role on a hit teen TV show to investigate his brother’s mysterious death while working on it three years earlier
An British-set period procedural that finds a former spy and a war widow starting a matchmaking service only to end up solving murders
A YA horror story that offers a updated spin on Scream, but with teens in Brooklyn
A true-crime thriller about undercover IRS agents taking down a Colombian drug cartel’s money-laundering ring in Miami in the ‘80s
A medical procedural about the National Institutes of Health’s “clinic of last resort,” where a team of expert doctors solve the rarest medical puzzles in the world