Actress-writer Malea Rose, Paul Haggis and his production company HWY 61, "are in development and pitching a miniseries" under the working title Dark Paradise, based on David E. Stannard's book Honor Killing: Race, Rape and Clarence Darrow's Spectacular Last Case, Deadline reported.
Haggis will direct the first episode and executive produce; Rose will be executive producer/creator and act in the series. She is also co-writing the script with Keith Thomas. Leopold Gout, who was an executive producer on Aaron Sorkin's Molly's Game, is co-executive producer.
"Leopold Gout introduced me to Malea Rose and said there is a book that I might be interested in," Haggis said. "So when I got to town for the Oscars, Leopold and Malea and I sat down and talked about it. It was about racism and intolerance in a setting that hadn't been explored yet."
Rose added: "In Hawaii, before the 1930s when this story takes place, there was a white oligarchy with slaves and racism. So when this woman--who is related on one side to Alexander Graham Bell and on the other side to Teddy Roosevelt--when she comes forward with this, it puts the entire island and America in chaos. Because you are threatening at this time white womanhood. That threw the world into an outrage and let loose a storm of racial and sexual hysteria. This story is the reason that Hawaii is known as the most liberal state in the union today. It's all because of these criminal cases."
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ABC has put in development How May We Hate You, an ensemble workplace comedy based on the book and blog by Anna Drezen and Todd Dakotah Briscoe, Deadline reported. From Aaron Kaplan's Kapital Entertainment, Wendy Trilling's TrillTV and CBS TV Studios, the project is written by Brooklyn Nine-Nine co-producer Justin Noble and has a script commitment plus penalty. Deadline noted that a "multi-camera comedy adaptation How May I Hate You was in development at CBS last season with the same executive producers and a different writer, Warren Lieberstein. The original studio, CBS TV Studios, is back for the new take."