If you’re keeping track of all the Stephen King adaptations currently underway, in the works, or about to arrive, here’s another one for your list: Blumhouse Television has snapped up the rights to King’s novel Later, which they will transform into a limited series starring Lucy Liu. Raelle Tucker (True Blood), the series creator, wrote the pilot.
Later is about a kid named Jamie who can communicate with the dead. For whatever reason, the dead people he talks to can’t lie to him—and for many reasons, the adults in his life take advantage of his ability. In a turn that gives new meaning to “ghostwriting,” Jamie’s literary agent mother, Tia, has her son talk to her recently deceased star client, in order to get enough info on his unfinished book to finish it herself. And Tia’s cop girlfriend also has need of Jamie’s skills. (Pushing Daisies crossover? This kid needs to meet the piemaker.)
Charles Yu called the book “something of a genre hybrid: part detective tale, part thriller, with a horror story filling in the seams.” Deadline noted at least one similarity to other King work: Jamie “gets over his head in the spirit world, as Danny Torrance did in King’s The Shining.”
Presumably, Liu will play Tia, though Deadline’s announcement isn’t clear on this. But seven seasons of Elementary (on which she was the best Watson, pictured above) have certainly primed her for roles that deal with mysteries and cops.
No network is attached, and no release date has been announced.
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