Sep 12, 2011

Tradecraft: NBC Books Spy Town Show

Tradecraft: NBC Books Spy Town Show

Deadline reports that NBC has bought a drama script by Peter Landesman called Secret America about a spy town. Imagine TV and 20th Century Fox TV are on board to produce. According to the trade blog, "the spy drama is set in a small town that appears to be middle America but actually harbors a large community of intelligence operatives." Keep in mind that this is just a script buy, which is a long, long way off from a produced show airing on television! There's a lot of hard work and luck involved between this step and that one...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Been years since I read any of them, but it sounds like the same idea/set up that John Maxim used for his 'Bannerman' series (although execution is everything - it could just as easily be turned into a version of the Village from 'The Prisoner').

Tanner said...

I'm not familiar with the Bannerman series, though I have been meaning to check it out. I didn't realize it had anything to do with a spy town.

Yeah, there are a lot of directions they could go with this! It could be like The Prisoner, or like Cop Land with spies (is that what Maxim's books are like? I've heard of a VA suburb where tons of CIA and NSA people retire), or like The Experts or that Danger Man episode "Colony 3" or the end of Ludlum's The Bourne Ultimatum and turn out to really be a Western-style town behind the Iron Curtain (or in the heart of Yemen or something more appropriate to this day and age) set up for training infiltrators. Or something else entirely! Tough to say from that simple log line...