Elan Mastai’s 2017 time travel novel All Our Wrong Todays is getting a television adaptation, Variety reports. The Orville‘s Seth McFarlane is set to produce the series, which will head to NBC’s streaming service Peacock.
Mastai is a screenwriter who’s best known for The F World and is currently a writer for NBC’s This Is Us. All Our Wrong Todays was his debut novel, and is set in an alternate world that looks like the future 1950s science fiction imagined, complete with flying cars, moon bases, and so forth.
The book follows a man named Tom Barren, who’s life is coming apart. When he’s given the chance to help out a chrononaut named Penelope Weschler, he falls in love with her, and accidentally goes back in time and further messes up reality. After ending up waking up in our 2016, he ends up pulled between both realities.
Back in 2017, Mastai told The Guardian that he wrote the novel as a way to come to terms with his mother’s death. He’d already embarked on a career as a screenwriter, and had been been musing about a story about alternative selves. Rather than turn the story into a screenplay, he opted to write it as a novel instead, and made a splash when he sold the book to Dutton for a rumored $1.2 million.
Work on an adaptation began around 2017, according to The Guardian, and he noted that he had some changes in mind as he turns the book into a new medium:
“On the very first meeting with the studio, I said: ‘These are the five big changes we need to make, and if I don’t say them, we’re going to be dancing around it.’ And I could see that everybody was … relieved. Not because they want to change it, but they also recognise that there are certain things that we just can’t do. I think they were concerned that I didn’t know that.”
Now, that adaptation seems to have found a home in Peacock, which launched last year as a streaming competitor to the likes of Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and which has been steadily building up its own roster of original content, including adaptations of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts + Crosses, Fonda Lee’s Jade City, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and a new Battlestar Galactica series.
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All Our Wrong Todays
