As he dons his tuxedo and prepares to get drunk with the rest of Hollywood at the Golden Globes this Sunday, 12 Years A Slave director Steve McQueen has another reason to celebrate. According to Deadline, McQueen is creating a new BBC series about the black experience in Britain—which McQueen, as a British black man, knows something about. The show will follow a group of friends and their families living in West London from the late 1960s through today. The announcement comes just a few months after news that McQueen is also working on a show for HBO, about a young African-American man entering New York high society.
Speaking to The Daily Mail about the British series, McQueen said, “I don’t think there has been a serious drama series in Britain with black people from all walks of life as the main protagonists.” The director plans to gather a group of actors for a series of workshops to help develop the program, which he says will be “epic in scope.” As of now it's untitled and isn’t expected to premiere for at least another year. While developing multiple TV shows at once may seem like a monumental task, McQueen is simply following the age-old adage: “The best way to get back at a heckling critic is to create prestige dramas on two different continents”