Poets & Writers Theater

Watch the trailer for Conversations With Friends, a television series based on the best-selling novel by Sally Rooney, starring Alison Oliver, Joe Alwyn, Sasha Blane, and Jemima Kirke. The series will air on Hulu in the United States and on BBC Three in the United Kingdom.

Watch the trailer for the HBO series The Time Traveler’s Wife, based on the best-selling 2003 novel by Audrey Niffenegger. The six-episode series stars Rose Leslie and Theo James and premieres in May.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is a television series adaptation of the 2010 novel of the same name by Walter Mosley. With a screenplay written by Mosley, the Apple TV+ miniseries stars Samuel L. Jackson as a man struggling with dementia who receives a treatment to regain his memory, helping him uncover mysteries from his family’s past.

Based on the best-selling historical novel by Min Jin Lee, Pachinko is an eight-episode series that follows a Korean immigrant family across four generations. The highly anticipated Apple TV+ series stars Yuh-Jung Youn, Lee Minho, Jin Ha, and Minha Kim and will be told in three languages—Korean, Japanese, and English.

“There is no before. Only now.” Watch this trailer for Station Eleven, an HBO limited series based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel. Adapted by Patrick Somerville, the series stars Mackenzie Davis, Himesh Patel, and Gael García Bernal.

“Was it real? Or was it my imagination?” Lisey’s Story is an eight-part Apple TV Plus miniseries based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Stephen King. Directed by Pablo Larraín, the series stars Julianne Moore, Clive Owen, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Nine Perfect Strangers is a television adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s novel of the same name starring Bobby Cannavale, Luke Evans, Regina Hall, Nicole Kidman, Melissa McCarthy, and Michael Shannon. The Hulu miniseries follows nine strangers who attend a wellness retreat at a place called the Tranquillum House run by a mysterious woman.

The Mosquito Coast is a new Apple TV Plus television series based on the 1981 best-selling novel of the same name by Paul Theroux. The seven-episode series stars Justin Theroux as Allie Fox, a radical idealist and inventor who uproots his family to Mexico when they find themselves on the run from the U.S. government.

A new trailer for the limited Amazon series The Underground Railroad, a television adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning historical fiction novel of the same name, has been released by director Barry Jenkins. The reverse-motion trailer features music composed by Nicholas Britell.

National Book Award–winning novel The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books, 2013) by James McBride has been adapted into a seven-episode series starring Rafael Casal as Cook, Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass, Ethan Hawke as John Brown, and Joshua Caleb Johnson as Onion. The series finale airs this Sunday on Showtime.

Looking for something eerie to watch? The Haunting of Bly Manor is a supernatural horror drama loosely based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The Netflix series created by Mike Flanagan stars Carla Gugino, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, T’Nia Miller, Victoria Pedretti, Kate Siegel, and Henry Thomas.

Director Barry Jenkins has released a teaser trailer for the upcoming television adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning historical fiction novel, The Underground Railroad (Doubleday, 2016). The limited Amazon series stars Thuso Mbedu as Cora, a woman who escapes a plantation in Georgia and finds the Underground Railroad, an actual train system transporting runaways to the north.

“The story is sprawling, the scope is sprawling. It unfolds over the course of a thousand years.” Executive producer and showrunner David Goyer introduces the trailer for the upcoming Apple TV Plus series Foundation, adapted from the award-winning science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov, which stars Laura Birn, Jared Harris, Leah Harvey, Lou Llobell, Terrence Mann, and Lee Pace.

“If you’re not happy, you’re nothing at all.” In this new television adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel, Brave New World, a seemingly perfect society is challenged and begins to unravel. Starring Alden Ehrenreich, Jessica Brown Findlay, Hannah John-Kamen, Harry Lloyd, and Demi Moore, the series premiered on the new Peacock streaming service on July 15.

“It always feels to me…all the way through writing a project, that the characters are actually real people and my job is to do justice to them,” says Sally Rooney about writing and adapting the characters of her novel Normal People (Faber & Faber, 2018) to the screen for the BBC/Hulu television series in this Waterstones interview with director Lenny Abrahamson and actors Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal.

This new Netflix miniseries about a woman growing up in a strict Hasidic Judaism sect in Brooklyn who flees her arranged marriage and cuts ties with the community is loosely based on Deborah Feldman’s 2012 memoir, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots. The four-episode series is directed by Maria Schrader and stars Shira Haas, Amit Rahav, and Jeff Wilbusch.

“I think Jane Austen, in general, writes about young people and young love very accurately,” says Leo Suter, who costars with Theo James and Rose Williams in the PBS Masterpiece adaptation of Jane Austen’s final unfinished novel, Sanditon, written and executive produced by Andrew Davies. Originally titled The Brothers, the manuscript was left unfinished in 1817 with only the first eleven chapters written, and has since been adapted and completed in various versions.

Agatha Christie’s 1961 novel The Pale Horse has been adapted into a two-part television series written by Sarah Phelps and directed by Leonora Lonsdale. Starring Georgina Campbell, Kaya Scodelario, and Rufus Sewell, the story begins with the murder of a priest soon after hearing a woman’s deathbed confession, and leads to an old pub inhabited by a mysterious trio of women, rumored to be witches.

Sally Rooney’s second novel, Normal People (Hogarth, 2019), has been adapted into a Hulu and BBC television miniseries directed by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald. The twelve-episode series stars Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal as two teenagers in Ireland from different backgrounds navigating friendship and romance through the years.

The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004), Philip Roth’s alternative history novel in which Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election and fascist anti-Semitism is on the rise, has been adapted into an HBO television miniseries. The series, directed by Minkie Spiro and adapted by David Simon, stars Ben Cole, Winona Ryder, Morgan Spector, John Turturro, and Zoe Kazan.