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.