Fox has ordered a put pilot of The Cure, a project from Malcolm Gladwell—author of several bestselling pop-science books and a staff writer at the New Yorker—and Glenn Gordon Caron, the creator of Medium. The Cure is a medical thriller about tackling a deadly disease; Deadline observes that The Cure stands out for being the rare drama that, right from its premise, centers on a black protagonist. She’s described as “a young, impulsive African-American neurologist who decides to take the law into her own hands.”
Gladwell has tried his hand at TV writing before, developing the script for the HBO Cold War drama The Missionary, a show that never made it past the pilot stage. Should The Cure go forward, it’s unknown whether he’d stick around or, like Michael Crichton on ER, just be there for the pilot and subsequent creator credit.
Fox’s decision to order The Cure as a put pilot (and pledging to pay a fee if it doesn’t pick it up) goes directly against its former chief Kevin Reilly’s assertion that it wasn’t going to do pilots anymore. It appears that, in the wake of Reilly’s departure, the studio has changed its mind about that.