An adaptation of Chuck Wendig’s acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Wanderers just got a bit more momentum: Lionsgate Television will produce the event series, and has brought in The Walking Dead’s Glen Mazzara to serve as showrunner.
What’s more, Wendig will be publishing a sequel, which is due out in 2022.
Wendig’s novel is set in the midst of a pandemic that overtakes the United States, turning those infected into sleepwalkers who are compelled to wander to a mysterious destination. The illness upends the social order around the country, prompting the rise of violent militias and other social unrest. The novel has been particularly acclaimed, and even before it hits stores last year, QC Entertainment had snapped up the rights for a TV series.
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Wanderers
Now, the project has a bit more steam. Mazzara worked as a producer and writer for shows like The Shield, Life, and The Walking Dead (for seasons 2 and 3), and tells Deadline that Wendig “certainly has his finger on America’s pulse. Wanderers has been incredibly prescient about so many things, it’s frightening.”
Deadline didn’t have many details about the sequel, (which Wendig says will be called Wayward), but did note that it’ll be set in the aftermath of Wanderers, and will follow the survivors as they “contend with a rising authoritarian force. Now, in an America broken by disease and political extremists, they must fight their way to a more hopeful future.”
There’s no word on where or when the TV adaptation of Wanderers will be released, but the announcement of a showrunner signals that the project is still moving forward. Despite the ongoing pandemic, it doesn’t seem as though TV shows about world-altering plagues are going away anytime soon: CBS just announced earlier today that it’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand (which Wanderers has been compared to) will debut in December this year.
I recently made it through Wanderers. It was interesting enough to suck me in at first, but I have to say that the whole ‘I’m going to write every chapter’s exposition in the vernacular of this section’s primary character’ eventually drove me so completely bats that by the end I was seriously hoping everyone would just die and get it over with. Plus two-dimensional-amazingly-evil Bad Guy, Mary Sue Good Guy, adorable-but-rebellious-and-smarter-than-most-everyone teenager, washed-up-rock-n-roller-with-heart-of-gold — I could go on. It read like a Tom Clancy novel written to be picked up as a TV series, and will no doubt translate perfectly to that medium. I’ll probably even watch it.
‘Acclaimed’. Guess the bar is not as high as it used to be.
@1
If it’s in Sturgeon’s 10% it’s going to be acclaimed.
@1 Just because you don’t like something, does not mean that it can’t be broadly acclaimed. I personally think Dune is a hot pile of garbage, but that doesn’t mean that the broad critical consensus about it is still overwhelmingly positive.
Wayward has been out for a bit now—I’m wondering if Lionsgate decided they were just going to sit on the Wanderers license but not actually produce a tv adaptation…