IP Picks🔎: Quirky Comedies and Corporate Dramas

➕ the theft of the Big Maple Leaf, the world's biggest and most valuable coin

MINOR LEAGUES, MAJOR LAUGHS The Asheville Tourists mascot waves to the crowd at a game. Ryan McGee just chronicled his year working for the team in a new memoir (Courtesy of Asheville Tourists)

Welcome to The Optionist! As always, thanks for reading. There were a couple of stories about hot IP this week that caught my attention, especially because Optionist subscribers had a leg up on both of them.

First, Warner Bros. made a big splash by optioning T.J. Newman’s Drowning, about passengers trapped on a sunken plane and the desperate mission to save them. WB paid $1.5 million against $3 million for the rights to the book, topping five other seven-figure offers. Deadline touted the week before that the manuscript had “leaked around town.” But it was featured in the Optionist almost a month before then (and the galley was already circulating at that point).

Also, 60 Minutes did a piece on the crazy story of how eBay tried to intimidate and spy on a Boston-area couple who ran a mildly negative newsletter about the company. Many who watch the show were probably thinking, “That would make a good movie — and who has the rights?” Optionist subscribers know we highlighted that piece in our very first newsletter and flagged the excellent Boston magazine story as available IP for it.

We work super hard to curate the best available IP out there and to get it in front of you first. And we scour as many magazines, newspapers and podcasts as we can so when a cool news story pops, you’ll hear about it here first.

On to this week’s picks, which feature a great mix of genres and stories, including a couple of promising sitcom possibilities, a pair of corporate dramas and a spy thriller. The rundown:

• A workplace comedy centered on a minor league baseball team.

• A quirky small-town sitcom about a woman who loses a marriage but finds a community of friends.

• A true-life financial thriller about two investors battling to see whose theory of disaster investing is more lucrative.

• A journalism procedural about what happened to an American killed in Ukraine and whether he was working for the FBI or the CIA.

• A heist caper about the theft of the Big Maple Leaf, the world’s largest and most valuable coin.

• A corporate drama set in the world of the Taiwanese semiconductor business, and the jockeying between China and the U.S. for power and influence.