Anonymous Content is turning Detransition, Baby into a tv show.
Wonderful news, and not a moment too soon! Deadline reported this morning that Torrey Peters’s novel Detransition, Baby is in development as a half-hour dramedy. It’s being developed by Anonymous Content, the production company behind Being John Malkovich, Spotlight, True Detective, Mr. Robot, and The OA, among other projects; the husband-and-wife producing team Joan Rater and Tony Phelan (Doubt, Council of Dads, Grey’s Anatomy) will serve as showrunners.
I, like many, can’t wait for this release. Peters is an executive producer on the project (as well as Rater and Phelan) and will write the pilot, so the show will likely stay true to the book, or at least morph according to Peters’s vision. And Detransition, Baby seems especially well-suited for TV; for a novel with such insightful narrators, a remarkable amount of that insight, humor, inner voice translates to their dialogue (unlike some other great contemporary books where the narrators’ brilliance doesn’t leave their head). It’s action-heavy, it’s thoughtful but not didactic, it’s a modern-day comedy of manners, it’s messy in the way some of the best TV is, it’s both deeply felt and deeply funny, its world is specific and vivid . . . and I can’t wait to see that essential oils demonstration scene onscreen.
