I admire viruses. Mindless but highly motivated. Out for a good time, to propagate themselves across the universe. Cunning little strands of RNA. My great grandfather died of the “Spanish” influenza and I’ve always been fascinated by Ebola, black death and the like. For the last two years I have been developing a science fiction television series and novel The Last Place You Look. In the series, set in an alternate reality, the Plague is a fact of modern life. Plague Doctors pick up the dead along with the blue bins. Some bizarre images I imagined two years ago — fashionable face masks, hand washing stations at shop doors, municipal trucks spraying down the streets with disinfectants – are now our new normal. What I did not predict is how COVID-19 is playing out politically. That’s the pandemic. Why am I panicking? A major arc of LPYL follows my hero as she struggles to invent a vaccine to end The Plague. I am racing to finish the script of the second episode and the series bible and get this out to market. Does my Plague make LPYL timely? Or is it too soon to discuss these issues? Or will some Hollywood heavyweight, a Shonda Rhimes or a Greg Berlanti, announce their pandemic series and suck up all the creative and commercial oxygen in the room. I hope to be pitching The Last Place You Look early June. Safely, on Zoom of course.
By James Nadler
