While Amy Sherman-Palladino has been firmly in the Netflix camp with the Gilmore Girls revival, she's switching to Amazon for a new pilot called The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. And she's not alone, as Guillermo del Toro's Carnival Row is among those new shows planned by the streaming arm of the behemoth company.
Carnival Row is, of course, the latest version of A Killing On Carnival Row, the script that del Toro's Pacific Rim writer Travis Beacham has been trying to get made since at least 2005. Set in an undetermined future, the action takes place in a city called the Burgue, a place that oddly looks like 18th century London. There, strange creatures share the streets with humans, but everyone is terrified by a serial killer stalking the darker areas. GDT set the project up at Amazon in January last year, but it's taken this long to get to pilot stage. The company put the embryonic series into development and ordered scripts from Beacham, del Toro, Star Trek veteran Rene Echeverria and Peter Cameron, with Echeverria's teleplay leading to the pilot order.
Sherman-Palladino, meanwhile, has been working on Maisel, which follows what happens when a 1950s housewife decides to become one of the first female stand-up comics. The other projects include The Legend Of Master Legend, written by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster based on Joshuah Bearman’s Rolling Stone article about real-life superheroes. You can read the piece here. Then there's Tropicana, from Andrea Simon, which is set in pre-revolutionary Cuba in and around the world of the Tropicana nightclub. Finally, we have Strange New Things, adapted by Matt Charman from Michael Faber's 2014 book. It follows Peter Leigh, an English pastor who embarks on the journey of a lifetime into deep space that takes him light years away from his beloved wife, Bea, and is described as Heart Of Darkness in space. Black Sea's Kevin Macdonald is attached to direct, with Brian Eno providing the music.