Edward Snowden has lived a pretty crazy life for the past few years, to the extent that an Oliver Stone movie about him failed to really capture the intensity of the real world. But CBS seems to have come up with a new and surprisingly creative way to make Snowden’s story really pop: by making it into a legal drama.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the network has ordered a drama pilot called Perfect Citizen about “a former general counsel for the NSA” who becomes “a whistleblower in an international scandal.” Rather than hiding halfway around the world and living in fear of being spied on by the government he exposed like the real Snowden, though, he “embarks on a new career at a storied law firm in Boston, facing the reality that while half the country thinks he’s our greatest patriot, the other half thinks he’s a traitor.” As always, things work out much happier on TV.