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Who's Ready For Some More Atwood-Inspired Nightmares? 'MaddAddam' Is Getting A TV Adaptation...

By Hannah Sole | TV | February 1, 2018 |

By Hannah Sole | TV | February 1, 2018 |


GettyImagesAtwood.jpg

It’s been in the works for a long time, but there’s finally been some movement on the latest Margaret Atwood adaptation: the MaddAddam trilogy.

A series adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “MaddAddam” novel trilogy is in the works at Paramount Television and Anonymous Content.

The companies won a bidding war for the trilogy, which is comprised of the novels “Oryx and Crake,” “The Year of the Flood,” and “MaddAddam.”

Darren Aronofsky was previously working on an adaptation of the novels at HBO, but it was revealed in October 2016 that that project was not moving forward. Aronofsky is not attached to the new adaptation. Instead, “MaddAddam” will be executive produced by Anonymous Content’s David Kanter and Bard Dorros along with Rock Paper Scissors Entertainment’s Angus Wall, Linda Carlson and Kent Kubena. It will be produced through the first look deal that Paramount TV and Anonymous Content recently signed with Rock Paper Scissors, which includes both scripted and unscripted content.

From Variety

Although Atwood might not be everyone’s favourite feminist at the moment, it seems that she is definitely in vogue in the world of TV; 2017 saw the release of The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu and Alias Grace on Netflix. Both bleak and resting on astonishing performances from their lead actors, Elisabeth Moss and Sarah Gadon, they gave us powerful stories about women in cruel, brutal worlds — worlds where all that the women can control is the way they tell their stories. The Handmaid’s Tale season 2 is on its way soon, and so we’ll finally find out what happened to June after she got into that van…

The MaddAddam books are a different ballgame; here Atwood’s take on a post-apocalyptic world follows different survivors, including Snowman/Jimmy, and the prepper-cult, God’s Gardeners, amongst genetically-modified creations ranging from weird and harmless, like the humanoid Crakers, to weird and utterly terrifying, like [takes a deep breath] the pigoons.

No, I didn’t make that word up. Imagine huge super-smart pigs that can (and will) hunt you down. They leave traps. They bear grudges. They will chomp on your bones until there’s nothing left. They are like the velociraptors of the MaddAddam world.

via GIPHY

I’m a bit obsessed with pigoons. When I heard that these books were coming to TV, my first reaction was “yay!” and then barely seconds later, “Oh no, pigoons!”

Pigoon-nightmares aside, these books are ripe for an adaptation. Way back in my earliest days at Pajiba, I said that for a long time, these books looked like a more plausible near-future than The Handmaid’s Tale (sweet, summer child); the novels tackle the ethics of genetic modification, presenting a massive divide between the haves and the have-nots, alongside pandemics that can’t be stopped, and concerns about mankind’s impact on the environment. The Year of the Flood (the second book in the series) even gets us to think about that fine line between paranoia and prescience that we associate with preparing for the end of the world as we know it.

So I guess I’m giving you an early warning that this show will not be cheerful. It’s definitely going to be weird though; not necessarily Britannia levels of weirdness, but weirdness nonetheless. Those pigoons will need to be CGI, surely — in which case, perhaps like the Direwolves in Game of Thrones, they will prove annoyingly costly and time-consuming to produce, and they won’t appear very often… Will the show commit to the novels’ presentation of the Crakers? Naked and with glowing blue bottoms when it’s mating time? Will the rakunks be cute? Will they weave together the different books into one concurrent storyline, or take them one at a time?

We’ll have to wait to find out, but I am properly excited about this one. You know, with just one reservation.

[Googles how to pigoon-proof the house and garden.]

No results found.

Oh god, there’s only one explanation: nothing will ever be pigoon-proof! They will always find a way in!

[Cries]