Breaking Bad duo Vince Gilligan and Michelle MacLaren have teamed up with Oscar winner Octavia Spencer for an HBO limited series. As first reported by the Hollywood Reporter, the pay cabler has put the drama Raven—based on the Peoples Temple nonfiction book by Tim Reiterman—into development, with Gilligan attached to write and MacLaren attached to direct. Both will executive-produce alongside Spencer, who first secured adaptation rights to the book (but is not attached to star).
The Peoples Temple was a cultlike religious organization run by Jim Jones in northwestern Guyana; in 1978, Jones initiated a “revolutionary suicide” that left over 900 Americans dead from cyanide poisoning, a bleakly symbolic end to the group’s operations. Raven will center on Jones as well as his followers, tracking the Peoples Temple’s history from its beginnings to its horrific conclusion. According to the Hollywood Reporter, it represents HBO’s next foray into the true-crime craze in dramatic television, likely buoyed by the recent critical success of crime drama The Night Of.
MacLaren served as Breaking Bad’s producing director from Season 3 through the end of its run, helming such classic episodes as “Four Days Out, “One Minute,” and “Gliding Over All.” In the years since the series’ conclusion, she has gone on to form a strong relationship with HBO, directing multiple Game of Thrones episodes and serving as executive producer and director on the David Simon pilot The Deuce, which was recently picked up to series. She is not a producer on Gilligan’s follow-up project, Better Call Saul, and this will thus mark their first collaboration since Breaking Bad.
