IP Picks🔎: A Timely Sports Scandal
➕ A fun — and furry — spin on the medical procedural
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along. A few odds and ends before we dive into this week’s picks.
One of our selections, a new biography of Pete Rose, gets the nice-timing award of the week. This look at the hard-nosed baseball legend who received a lifetime ban from the game for gambling, had the good fortune to publish just days after the latest MLB gambling story broke. So far, L.A. Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani is claiming that he’s the victim of lies and theft by his interpreter Ippei Mizuhara, but there are so many unanswered questions (like how did Mizuhara have access to millions of dollars in Ohtani’s bank account?) that no one knows how this scandal will unfold. For the book’s author, Keith O’Brien, it’s a definite boon because the current gambling story has sparked discussion about the Rose case — as well as one of baseball’s most sacrosanct rules: You don’t bet on the game. The book wasn’t on my radar until the Ohtani scandal, but it’s a great story made newly relevant and further proof that timing can be everything!
Elsewhere, I loved these dueling London Book Fair pieces. Well, not so much “dueling” as the NYT merely covered the fair while Brianna Zimmerman, a book scout with a Substack, absolutely crushed what she called the Gray Lady’s “completely laughable” reporting. Come for the takedown; stay for Zimmerman’s insights on what was hot at the fair.
Netflix Bump No. 1: A reminder of the lift that a screen adaptation can give to book sales. This one involves One Piece, the Netflix series which grew out of a Japanese comic and debuted last summer. As Publishers Weekly notes, eight months after its launch on the streamer, three of the manga’s collected editions are still on the trade paperback bestseller list. Not bad.
Netflix Bump No. 2: The streamer’s hotly anticipated adaptation of the hit Chinese sci-fi saga The Three-Body Problem (retitled 3 Body Problem on Netflix) dropped on March 21, and the novel is already completely sold out at Amazon, per Bleeding Cool News. Even Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic Silent Spring, which a character is seen reading on screen, got a lift, rising to No. 1 in the environmental section. Not bad x 2.
Onto this week’s picks, which feature that timely Rose bio plus a quirky medical procedural and three other choice pieces of IP:
A biopic centered on the gambling scandal that brought down baseball great Pete Rose.
A medical procedural set in the world of NYC concierge medicine . . . for pets.
A legal thriller about a lawyer who goes undercover for the FBI to bring down a drug dealer and avoid jail time for a murder he didn’t commit.
An emotional drama about two families reuniting a decade after one of their kids committed suicide.
A drama (or maybe a comedy) about a reporter who once faked being a high school student returning to the story years earlier.
