Kurt Vonnegut readers just may have the television series they’ve always dreamed about. It was announced a few months ago that a television adaptation of Vonnegut’s literary classic Cat’s Cradle was in the early stage of development. Now it seems the development process has taken a huge step forward, with a showrunner and network involved in moving it forward. And if you’re not a Vonnegut fan but you are, say, a fan of FX’s Fargo you should still listen up.
Fargo creator, writer, and showrunner Noah Hawley is set to develop a new limited series based on Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Deadline reports that, in addition to Hawley’s involvement, FX has also signed on to air the show if it makes it through the development process. Yes. Please.
Originally published in 1963, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is a satire of the building and history of the atom bomb. While this might not seem like a laugh-riot Vonnegut creates an original character, Felix Hoenniker, the fictional creator of the atom bomb, as well as his children who hold another creation of Felix’s. The scientific aspect of the novel creates a strange sci-fi/satire mixture that only an innovator like Vonnegut could have made a success.
As we previously reported, the Cat’s Cradle series is still in the early stages of development. However, the announcement that Hawley, and the network FX itself are working in tandem is a huge step forward in the development process. After the wild success of Fargo, the Hawley/FX partnership is clearly a highly functional and creative one. While this venture into adapting a piece of classic literature into a limited series seems like a daunting task, one might also argue that Hawley had his hands full adapting the classic Coen brothers film into a series. And he did just that, with surprising success.
The news of Hawley’s involvement comes shortly after the news that he would be doing another TV adaptation. Just a month ago, news broke that Noah Hawley would be developing and showrunning an X-Men television series adaptation, also for FX. That upcoming series, named Legion, will reportedly be shooting its pilot in January, and will hopefully be successful enough Hawley and the Legion team will be asking FX to move the series forward to a full season.
Once again, this highlights just how much the network trusts and wants to showcase Hawley’s work. This means there is a possibility that, if Fargo continues on the way it is, and the both of these other projects make it to air, Noah Hawley will be running three separate series on one network. It should be interesting to see exactly how involved he would be, juggling those projects, as well as other writing and producing projects he also has outside of FX.
From what I’m gathering, FX should just rebrand and call themselves the Ryan Murphy and Noah Hawley network because with each of them running 2-3 series on the same network, I can’t imagine there is much room for other showrunners on team FX. And with the network clearly willing to take risks with such unique, dark, and twisted programming, it might just be the only network that has what it takes to turn Cat’s Cradle into a bonafide TV hit.
