Moonlight’s stellar director, Barry Jenkins, will write and direct a new one-hour drama series on Amazon based on Colson Whitehead’s bestselling book, The Underground Railroad, Variety reports.
The passage chronicles the story of a young girl named Cora, who’s on a mission to escape the Georgia plantation she inhabits inside the slave driven South. To her surprise, she finds that the railroad has a more literal than metaphorical feel to it. The book garnered a spot on Oprah’s 2016 book selection, and sold a reported 825,000 nationwide in the U.S. in all different types of formats.
“It’s a groundbreaking work that pays respect to our nation’s history while using the form to explore it in a thoughtful and original way,” Jenkins said. “Preserving the sweep and grandeur of a story like this requires bold, innovative thinking and in Amazon we’ve found a partner whose reverence for storytelling and freeness of form is wholly in line with our vision.”
Though this is Jenkins’ first attempt at directing a TV series, we’re sure judging off the success Moonlight had since winning 2016’s Best Picture at the Oscars—he won’t disappoint.