It’s become fairly common for directors to follow up their first breakout success with a turn on the not-so-small screen: Ava DuVernay went from Selma’s Best Picture nomination to OWN’s Queen Sugar, and Robert Eggers celebated The Witch’s box-office fortunes by signing to do a miniseries about Rasputin. But Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins could be the first to go directly from winning an Oscar to TV land, as the series he was developing based on Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad has landed at Amazon Studios. Jenkins has also directed episodes of the forthcoming Netflix series Dear White People, developed by Justin Simien from his film of the same name.
“Going back to The Intuitionist, Colson’s writing has always defied convention, and The Underground Railroad is no different,” Jenkins told Variety. “It’s a groundbreaking work that pays respect to our nation’s history while using the form to explore it in a thoughtful and original way.”
The project, developed with Brad Pitt’s Plan B, who also produced Moonlight, is conceived as a “limited series,” according to TVLine, meaning that it will have a finite end in mind, although the number of episodes has not yet been determined.
Jenkins’ Underground Railroad is still in development, so there’s not much more to report, but Whitehead has already started fan-casting it. Walton Goggins, call your agent.
