It’s been a good couple of years for the quiet rehabilitation of M. Night Shyamalan’s career. His 2015 family horror film The Visit was his first legitimately fun movie in at least a decade, while the upcoming James McAvoy feature Split is drawing positive reviews after a “secret screening” at this year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin.
Now, though—in a moment as inevitable as the “inevitable twist” jokes in an article about M. Night Shyamalan’s career—the writer and director’s newfound credibility is taking a strange and surprising turn, into the world of TV cartoon comedy. Variety is reporting that Shyamalan has sold a script for an animated family sitcom to Fox, titled Eleven Little Indians.
Written with Family Guy’s Alex Carter, the series will center on three branches of a large Indian family, one of whom “has achieved the American dream; another has just arrived in the U.S. wide-eyed; and the third has gone off the rails.” (Shyamalan himself is Indian-American, with his family moving to the States when he was just a kid.)
Eleven Little Indians will be the director’s second project with Fox; he also served as an executive producer and pilot director for the network’s more traditionally Shayamalanesque sci-fi series, Wayward Pines.