It’s nearly November, which means we’re due for our annual check-in on Amazon’s adaptation of William Gibson’s The Peripheral. We first heard about it back in 2018 when Westworld showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy first started developing the project, and then we heard about it again in 2019 when Amazon picked up the series. Now it’s 2020, and Variety says that Chloë Grace Moretz will be starring in the show as Flynne Fisher, “a woman trying to hold together the pieces of her broken family in a forgotten corner of tomorrow’s America.” Maybe by 2021 we’ll get the name of at least one co-star?
The book takes place in two separate timelines, before and after a devastating economic collapse, with Flynne taking a job as a security drone operator in a futuristic video game and witnessing a digital murder that might be a real murder. Saying too much more would probably be a spoiler, but it should be pretty obvious that there’s some high-tech time travel-y stuff involved. It’s sort of like Ready Player One but with a sci-fi dystopia instead of ‘80s movies. Knowing Nolan and Joy, it could all end up being pretty cool in the transition to TV… but with the potential for some odd rough spots if this gets to three seasons.