A limited series about the Cuban Missile Crisis is in the works from Samuel Franco, Evan Kilgore, and Adam Goodman’s Dichotomy Creative, Variety has learned exclusively.
The series is currently titled “DEFCON-2.” It is based on Sheldon M. Stern’s book “The Week the World Stood Still,” which featured transcriptions of secretly recorded meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm), as well as prior interviews with members of the U.S. Foreign Affairs Committee. No network or streaming service is currently attached to the project.
Per the official description, “The series focuses on the events not only through the eyes of President Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, but through those that surrounded them, namely Associate Press Secretary and White House speechwriter, Andrew T. Hatcher (at the time, the highest ranking African American in the West Wing) and Presidential secretary Jill Cowen, whose transcription of the ExComm tapes gave her a front-row seat to a world on the brink of destruction.”
Franco and Kilgore will write and executive produce the series. Goodman will also executive produce along with Matt Skiena and Peter Eskelsen. The search is currently on for a director.
Franco and Kilgore recently attached director James Gray to their Black List script about JFK’s time as a PT-boat captain during World War II. They are also the writers behind “Keeper of the Diary” at Searchlight Pictures, about Otto Frank’s attempts to get his daughter Anne’s diary published. In TV, they are currently at work on “Queen of Persia,” an epic Biblical series, and a series adaptation of “The Fall of the House of FIFA” at FX.
They are repped by Verve and Yorn Levine.
Dichotomy was founded by Goodman, who was previously the president of production at Paramount and DreamWorks. Skiena is his partner in the business, with the company currently at work on a number of projects across multiple platforms.