IP Picks🔎: The Crazy True Story of First Spelling Bee

➕ a wilderness survival thriller and two rom-coms with 'Ted Lasso' charm

BEE HERE NOW Dev Shah was crowned the 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion on June 1, but the very first national champion back in 1908, 17 years before Scripps even started, was a Black girl from Cleveland. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images).

Welcome to The Optionist, especially all the new readers who have signed up since the strike began. It seems like many of you are hunkering down for a long work stoppage and are thinking this is a good time to cast about for new projects — even if writers can’t be attached yet. Good thinking. You know the Marines motto? Be prepared. And there’s no better time to hunt for new material than right now.

Before we turn to this week’s rundown, I wanted to flag a fantastic excerpt from Vanity Fair editor Maureen Ryan’s new book, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, in case you missed it. It digs deep into the toxic culture on Lost and the role of showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse in creating those problems. The specific stories about Lost aren’t that surprising, but the level of detail and the number of people she got on the record is spectacular, including both Cuse and Lindelof, whose “I don’t remember” denials seem really damming in the face of all her evidence. It’s a really fascinating (and discouraging) look at how awful some sets can be, and a reminder of how a little success can allow a culture of bullying and abuse to go on unchecked. If the whole book, which comes out next week, is close to the excerpt, it should be a big hit.

On to a happier story: This week’s picks. We’ve got a couple of rom-coms that exude Ted Lasso energy for those of you like me who are already missing that show’s feel-good aesthetic, and two books with non-traditional leads — a female-fronted spy thriller and a gay PI — which are especially promising. The full rundown:

• A rom-com about a twentysomething woman who time jumps into her forties (kids, hubby, career) and finds that the so-called good part of life isn’t necessarily better than the messy and uncertain twenties.

• A rom-com that sees a disgraced sports executive and a retired pro athlete finding love and redemption coaching a kids’ soccer team.

• A YA adventure thriller about two teens, rock-climbing fanatics, searching for one of their fathers lost in the Cascades, and how it might link to a World War II tragedy.

• An action thriller about two kids trapped in the Montana wilderness as they try escape their mob boss father and survive a blizzard.

• A true inspirational drama about the Black girl who won the very first National Spelling Bee in 1908.

• A real-life drama about two women cured of decades-long catatonic schizophrenia.