HBO has long since welcomed Laura Dern back into the premium-cable fold, having picked up her saleswoman drama and cast her as an anti-bullying crusader in the small-screen adaptation of Big Little Lies last year. And the former Enlightened star has just been given another opportunity (read: lead role) to continue Amy Jellicoe’s “agent of change” work, as Deadline reports that Dern will star in and executive produce an upcoming drama about death row inmates.
The as-yet-untitled series comes from documentarian Alex Gibney (Going Clear: Scientology And The Prison Of Belief), who will write and executive produce with Dern, who will play a court-appointed psychiatrist who must “determine from her twisted yet humanizing diagnostic exchanges with death row inmates if they are sane enough to be killed by the state.” The series will be Gibney’s narrative debut, but he previously tackled the subject matter in collaboration with Robert Redford and Susan Sarandon on the CNN docu-series, Death Row Stories. The filmmaker described his new project as “an opportunity to shine a light on a dark and brutal corner of our justice system with a series of illuminating conversations that explore the best and worst of what it means to be human.”