Feminist fans of Black Mirror may soon have a show focused specifically on the horrors of being a woman.
Before Carmen Maria Machado’s debut story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, even hit shelves last fall, her publisher, Graywolf, pressed the button on a fourth reprint. She’d already been nominated for a National Book Award by then, and her queer, feminist horror stories arrived in the midst of an explosive conversation about gender, abuse, and the way women’s stories had been silenced for decades. Hollywood sensed the book’s potential, and Machado spoke with dozens of interested parties. After a competitive series of pitches from producers, writers, and directors, Machado chose Imagine Television to develop the book, with writer Gina Welch (of Feud and The Terror) attached. They’re pitching the project as an anthology series — a sort of feminist Black Mirror. Samie Kim Falvey, the president of Imagine Television, told Vulture in an email that Machado’s stories “capture the intense, unspoken psychology of inhabiting a woman’s body today.†The series, she predicted, will “undoubtedly be a force in the conversation about gender.â€