Contagion writer Scott Z. Burns is making a musical for AMC that will hopefully be less bleak

Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion has been on people’s minds for the past month, or at least it was before “Hey, let’s watch Contagion” stopped being a darkly funny joke and started just being dark, and now the film’s writer is apparently taking advantage of that new relevance by landing a project that sounds absolutely nothing like Contagion—and thank whatever god you prefer for that. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Scott Z. Burns (the aforementioned writer) has sold a “musical anthology series” to AMC called National Anthem. It’s apparently a “tragically funny story” about a middle-class family “tumbling down the ladder of American society” and “periodically bursting into song.” National Anthem will also be produced by T Bone Burnett, The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, and Breaking Bad’s Mark Johnson Breaking Bad was the name of a TV show, we understand if you’re confused because the other two guys are music people), with Burnett and Finn contributing to music and lyrics.

The Hollywood Reporter story mentions that it’s unclear when production on this will actually start, given everything going on in the world, but at least AMC is planning for the future. There’s something hopeful we can all take from that, right? Also, if Burns’ decision to write a virus movie nine years ago is any indication that he has some kind of precognitive ability, maybe this means we’ll all start singing in 2029. Wouldn’t that be fuuuuun? To sing a song with everyoooonnne? (Pretend we were singing that part. It’s hard to sing in text.)