The pilot for Justin Cronin's epic vampire trilogy, The Passage, has been ordered by Fox TV
The pilot for The Passage, Justin Cronin's enormous, bestselling, millenium-spanning 3-book vampire epic, has been picked up by 20th Century Fox Television.
Deadlinereported earlier this year that Felicity co-creator Matt Reeves will direct the pilot written by Liz Heldens (Friday Night Lights), and Fox picked that pilot up in what Deadlineis saying is a pilot binge by the network.
Ridley Scott is executive producing, along with Heldens, Reeves, David W. Zucker and Adam Kassan. The series was originally optioned as a movie when the first novel was only half-written, but Free and Heldens felt it worked much better as a tv series, and moved the option accordingly.
The book series jumps back and forth in time between a hundred years in the future, where residents of one of the last remaining colonies of humans in a United States overrun by vampires try to keep the ultraviolent lights on, and the present day as the vampire outbreak quickly overtakes the country. It's often compared to Stephen King's The Stand.
You might want to put some potholders on, because there is a scorching take incoming: having ripped through The Passage, The Twelve and City of Mirrors this past May, I can comfortably say that these are better. City of Mirrors in particular delivers an end to the story that The Stand, with its literal handwave, could not.
The Passage is an incredibly strong, engrossing, and genuinely terrifying read. If the show is half as good as the novels, it's going to be a blockbuster.
