A little more than a week after the death of Backstreet Boys creator, blimp magnate, and convicted criminal Lou Pearlman, a TV show about his life and creations is already in the works. Variety is reporting that Conde Nast has tapped a story from its own The New Yorker—John Seabrook’s “We Live In The Pop-Culture World That Lou Pearlman Created”—as the source material for a limited series about the remarkably successful music producer (and remarkably unsuccessful legal defendant), that it’s now shopping around to networks.
As Seabrook’s article attests, it’s hard to discount Pearlman’s influence on modern music, or the often-ugly shadow he cast over many of its stars. Between The Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, and any number of other boy bands of the early 2000s, he helped define the musical landscape of a generation. He was also a convicted Ponzi schemer, ruthlessly unfair businessman, and all-around weird guy, a combination of factors that’ll probably make the series a shoe-in for some prestige cable network hungry for anti-heroes, true crime stories, and oddballs. (Besides, we’ve all been waiting way too long for a hard-hitting expose to blow the lid off the cutthroat world of blimp management and helicopter rentals once and for all.) Conde Nast is currently looking for writers and directors to work on the show.