Soon enough, Reese Witherspoon will have her own television channel — the woman partially responsible for Big Little Lies is helming yet another project. As per Vulture, Witherspoon is developing a show based on the book Are You Sleeping, a book by Kathleen Barber loosely based on the podcast Serial. The show will stream on Apple TV, and it will star Octavia Spencer. (So, some of us might actually have to get Apple TV.)
Are You Sleeping is based on Serial in the sense that the book, which is fictional, details the fallout of a true crime story after a popular podcast reopens the case. So, it's about the fallout surrounding the 2014 podcast.
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A little background if you've never listened to the podcast: Serial investigated a murder case from 1999. The show proposed that Adnan Syed, the man convicted of the murder, did not in fact kill his girlfriend Hae Min Lee. As a result of the podcast, Syed was granted another trial. After Serial, true crime podcasts proliferated, so much so that we have a growing list of the best ones. Serial gave way to true crime television series like Making a Murderer and The Keepers, or even Errol Morris's Wormwood. Now, there's a television show about a fictional true crime podcast. The podcast has eaten the TV series, or the TV has eaten the podcast. Either way, the true crime ouroboros is complete.
This is Witherspoon's second announced project with Apple TV. Late last year, Variety reported that Witherspoon would star in and executive produce a series about morning news. This show will also star Jennifer Aniston.
So, again, I guess we'll all have to figure out how to get Apple Video. It's going to be weird, but we're all in this together.
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