Potentially heralding the rise of a whole new generation of comedy nerds who won’t stop saying “42,” “hoopy,” or “frood,” TV mega-producer Carlton Cuse has announced that he intends to make a TV version of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy for Hulu. Cuse—who’s currently working on the Locke & Key adaptation for Netflix—will soon be turning his hand to Adams’ beloved novel about the inevitable end of the world, and all the absurdist sci-fi parody nonsense that comes after it.
Adapters have struggled with Adams’ work in the past, at least in part because of how inherently shaggy, digression-prone, and casually fantastic his prose could be. The British TV version of Hitchhiker’s from the late ’70s suffered from some pretty obvious budget issues, for instance—two-headed aliens being tricky to pull off effectively on the cheap—while the 2005 film version (filmed from a script Adams co-wrote before his death) suffered from a certain inescapable listlessness. (And the less said about Eoin Colfer’s truly awful attempts to continue the book franchise from Adams’ notes in the late 2000s, the better.) There have been mild successes, though; the Dirk Gently TV show was pretty interesting, for instance, even if it’s been inevitably tainted by its association with writer and producer Max Landis. If nothing else, it showed that Adams’ love for episodic storytelling—the Hitchhiker’s series was, after all, originally written as a radio show before it became a book—might be a better fit for television than film.
Cuse is writing and producing the series with Jason Fuchs, whose most high-profile success was co-writing Wonder Woman, and who also has a few more questionable credits (Pan, Ice Age: Continental Drift) to his name. Both men are reportedly avowed fans of Adams works, which will hopefully assuage fans of their fears that another one of these adaptations might turn out less than hoopy in the end.