Hulu’s been the home to the TV adaptation of author Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale since 2017, and it looks like it’ll be delving into another of the author’s works: her dystopian Madaadam trilogy. According to Deadline, the streaming service has tapped Michael Lesslie to pen the adaptation.
Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy kicked off in 2003 with her novel Oryx and Crake, and was followed with The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013). The books were set in the future after a deadly, genetically-engineered pandemic devastates the world, and gives rise to a new species of humanity. The trilogy follows a small group of characters as they work to help bring about that new race into the world.
There have been a couple of efforts over the years to adapt the trilogy: Darren Aronofsky and his production company Protozoa Pictures lined up a series with HBO back in 2014, and while they’d apparently written the entire project, HBO later backed out a couple of years later. After that, the rights to the series moved over to Paramount Television in 2018, where it’s simmered for a couple of years.
Now, it looks as though the project will land with Hulu, where it’ll join either join or succeed The Handmaid’s Tale. (which is set to return for season 4 in April, and will return for a fifth next year.) There’s no timeline for when the series will hit Hulu — or even if it’ll make it through the developmental process.
Lesslie was recently attached to Peacock’s Battlestar Galactica reboot, which has been developed by Mr. Robot‘s Sam Esmail, and it’s not clear what his departure will mean for that project. He’s set to write the pilot episode for this new adaptation, and will serve as an executive producer for it. The project also isn’t the only adaptation from Atwood in the works by the network: Hulu was also developing an adaptation of her Handmaids Tale sequel The Testaments, which came out in 2019, and which could serve as an “extension” to the ongoing Handmaids Tale series.
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Oryx and Crake
