According to Deadline, Amazon has picked up five new pilots, and they include new projects from Guillermo Del Toro and Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino—unfortunately, though, the two of them aren’t working on the same show. The pilots are Carnival Row, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Strange New Things, The Legend Of Master Legend, and Tropicana, but before we tell you what they’re about you should challenge yourself to guess which one is from Del Toro and which one is from Sherman-Palladio. (Hint: Tropicana is about a Lovecraftian nightmare monster that loves its mom and talks really fast…or is it?)
First up is Carnival Row, which—if you didn’t guess—comes from Del Toro and his Pacific Rim writing partner Travis Beacham. The project has actually been in the works since last January, and it reportedly involves a serial killer on the loose in a futuristic city that happens to look like Victorian London for some reason. Also, the city is “inhabited by humans and other creatures,” which should help give it a little bit more of that Del Toro sparkle.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is the Sherman-Palladino show, and it’s said to be a dramedy about “a 1950s housewife who decides to be one of the first female stand-up comics.” We don’t know whether it’ll skew more toward drama or comedy, but it would be cool if Sherman-Palladino put some unexpected edge on it and made the eponymous Mrs. Maisel into one of the first female insult comics.
Strange New Things is an adaptation of Michael Faber’s 2014 book The Book Of Strange New Things, which was a book about some new things that are strange. More specifically, it’s about “an English pastor who embarks on the journey of a lifetime into deep space.” Apparently, it’s like “Heart Of Darkness in space” and is also “an epic with a heart-wrenching love story of a husband and wife with the universe between them at the center.”
The final two shows are The Legend Of Master Legend and Tropicana. The former is described as a “real-life superhero comedy” about a masked vigilante named Master Legend who fights crime alongside his sidekick, the Ace. Tropicana has no nightmare monsters, but it is “set in pre-revolutionary Cuba in and around the world of the Tropicana nightclub.” Deadline says the show will be “exploring the intersection of entertainers, the mob, Batista loyalists, Castro revolutionaries, and the American CIA.”