Another Earth director creating Hulu series about an insomnia outbreak
Melissa Rosenberg is currently serving as showrunner on Marvel’s upcoming Jessica Jones series for Netflix, and is responsible for some of the better writing on early seasons of Dexter. Unfortunately, she will also forever be known as the one who wrote the words people said in all the Twilight movies, so one assumes she’s got a sense of atonement she’s working through. Perhaps as part of that expiation of guilt, Deadline reports the writer-producer’s Tall Girl production company has sold new drama Sleepless to Hulu, a series to be written and directed by Another Earth and I Origins’ Mike Cahill.
Based on the novel Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun, Sleepless will tell the story of an insomnia epidemic, “told intimately through the eyes of an ensemble of complicated characters.” It sounds like an odd mix of deep character study and allegorical pseudoscience, which means it’s perfect for the guy who wrote and directed one movie about a second Earth appearing near our own, and another one about the souls of dead people detectable in the eyeballs of currently living people via “science.” It’s expected to be an ongoing series with a 10-episode first season, and Cahill set to write and direct most if not all of those initial installments.
In addition to optioning the book for this project, Rosenberg and Tall Girl are keeping busy producing a new half-hour sitcom for TV Land called The Mighty Camilla, about a New York social worker who “gets recruited by a handsome man from the future as the unlikely savior of humanity.” That’s in addition to producing the upcoming feature film Scarpetta, based on the novels of Patricia Cornwell. So, really working overtime to make us forget this, then.