12 Years A Slave director to mine human misery on a weekly basis for HBO

After years of plumbing the depths of human suffering and depravity through movies like Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years A Slave, director Steve McQueen is bringing that misery to your living room with a new show for HBO, where “human suffering and depravity” is just an episode description of Game Of Thrones. McQueen has partnered with World War Z co-writer Matthew Michael Carnahan and another guy who’s engineered some terrible things, Russell Simmons, developing an as-yet-untitled drama that’s being compared to “Six Degrees Of Separation meets Shame.” (So, the scene where Will Smith is caught in bed with a hustler, but over and over again.) It’s further described as  “an exploration of a young African-American man’s experience entering New York high society, with a past that may not be what it seems.” Knowing McQueen, presumably his past involves watching puppies get murdered, and “entering high society” is a euphemism for being thrown off a skyscraper.