“Penny Dreadful” creator set as showrunner on Meryl Streep’s “Nix”

PanARMENIAN.Net - John Logan has lined up his next gig. The Penny Dreadful creator has been tapped to serve as showrunner and executive producer of The Nix, the Warner Bros. Television drama from J.J. Abrams starring Meryl Streep, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

Based on a 2016 novel by Nathan Hill, Abrams and Hill will executive produce the project, which is being developed as a limited series. The Nix does not yet have a network attached.

Hill's critically acclaimed debut novel — which debuted at No. 5 on the New York Times' best-seller list — centers on college professor and stalled writer Samuel Andresen-Anderson, who hasn't seen his mother, Faye, since childhood, the day she walked out of his life. Now she has reappeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the internet and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high school sweetheart. Which version of his mother is true? To save her, Samuel will have to embark on his own journey, from the suburban Midwest to New York City to the 1968 riots that rocked Chicago, uncovering long-buried secrets about the woman he thought he knew, secrets that stretch across generations all the way back to Norway, home of the mysterious Nix.

The Nix marks Logan's second television series following Showtime's Penny Dreadful, which ended its three-season run in June. His credits include the Tony-winning play Red, Broadway's I'll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers and co-writing the book for the musical The Last Ship, as well as features Skyfall, Spectre, Hugo, The Aviator, Gladiator, Sweeney Todd and The Last Samurai.

WBTV acquired Hill's debut novel The Nix for Bad Robot Productions and Streep to develop for TV. Abrams and Bad Robot's Ben Stephenson will executive produce alongside Logan and his Desert Wolf Productions, Hill and Streep. James J. Bagley and Joan Boorstein will co-exec via Desert Wolf.