IP Picks🔎: Two Twists on ‘Succession’ & Megachurch Secrets Revealed

➕ High school debaters — and Ted Turner deserves a biopic

FAMILY BUSINESS From left: Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong on HBO’s Succession. (Ankler illustration; Claudette Barius/HBO)

Welcome to The Optionist. Lots of interesting things caught my attention this week — but let’s start with the death of Ted Turner.

What an endlessly fascinating life he led. Early on in the Optionist, I spoke with Porter Bibb, a friend of Turner’s who wrote a biography of the CNN founder, about how to make a biopic about him.

“I call him the first honest billionaire because he gave a billion dollars to the United Nations to initially pay the dues the U.S. owed and hadn’t paid for more than a decade,” Porter told me. “He really created the Giving Pledge that Gates and Buffet have taken up. He is the largest landowner in the United States — well, second now to John Malone — and he's deeded all of it to the Nature Conservancy. He’s the greatest ocean racing sailor in history. You’ve got CNN, and he also created the first satellite television station. One of the most extraordinary things he did, which almost nobody remembers, is that after the U.S. pulled out of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, he created his own Olympics in Moscow — the Goodwill Games — which was a huge financial and sporting success.”

There was more, too, including buying the Atlanta Braves and later finding $12 million in the club’s home-field concession stands.

We’re still waiting for the Turner movie, which is a shame because there’s more than one part of his life ripe for adaptation.

Elsewhere:

• The L.A. Times has flooded the zone in the last couple of weeks, chronicling wild book clubs. Here’s one — the Booked Babes — that takes getting into the spirit of the book to extremes, dressing up like Marie Antoinette for a discussion of a murder mystery set in the 1700s or hosting a “cowboy picnic” in Franklin Park for another. Then there’s the Yacht Girls, who have their meetings on a vintage yacht at the California Yacht Club. This roundup details some others that are comparably less extravagant, such as the one that’s basically a hike + book club and another that’s a silent reading party.

• I inhaled Netflix’s new adaptation of Lord of the Flies. It’s so good and faithful to the book in all the right ways. The book, of course, is a classic — a go-to text for young adult readers in school for decades. It has only been adapted on screen a few times, but inspired more productions than I can count (among the latest really good ones: Yellowjackets). It’s worth remembering that the book was rejected over and over before a new hire at Faber & Faber picked it up off the slush pile. (There are also interesting details at that link about how the manuscript changed from original draft to published version as well.)

• Seventeen years after her debut, The Help, became a huge bestseller and then a hit movie, Kathryn Stockett is finally out with a second novel. To celebrate, she’s in the press, complaining about the backlash over how the first book portrayed its Black characters and the Civil Rights Movement. (“I was not prepared for a lot of those conversations, but I learned a new language,” she said.) This time around, she seems to be focusing on just white characters and talking about the oodles of research she did for the book, which is set in the 1930s. Whatever. I have little patience for Southerners who think their naivete about the racial history around them is an invitation to have a discussion about educating them. Do the work first.

• Rolling Stone and NPR both profiled rescue dog influencer Isabel Klee, whose just-published book, Dogs, Boys, and Other Things I've Cried About, was an Optionist pick in January.

This week: A Time Travel and an Agatha Christie spin on Succession, A pastor’s wife gets real and high school debaters

Time travel is a perennial genre, but I definitely think I’ve noticed an uptick in books featuring it of late — including a couple that were quietly optioned way ahead of publication. A lot of these are less sci-fi stories than ones that use time travel as a hook to tell a richly dramatic story, as in this one that also owes a debt to Succession. I know all of us have heard so, so many “Succession meets X” pitches, but this one that combines that with an Agatha Christie-style mystery really hits the mark.

🔒The full lineup for paid subscribers:

⏳ A Succession meets time-travel story with limited series potential, about a woman who travels back in time to make her family’s fortune in the future.

🏔 A classic Agatha Christie-style country house murder mystery centered on a Succession-like family.

🙏 A Greenleaf-meets-Empire screen-ready drama about what goes on behind the scenes in a megachurch

🗣️ A story with both movie and series potential about high school debaters.

🤼‍♂️ A One Day meets Pachinko sweeping romantic drama perfect for a limited series centered on a college student in a star-crossed romance and her mother’s secret revolutionary past.

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