The biggest mystery about Middlesex being optioned for a series adaptation is what took so long for it to happen. The Jeffrey Eugenides novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003, and was previously being developed as a series for HBO all the way back in 2009. Eleven years later, according to Variety, it has been acquired by Paramount Television Studios, and has 50 Shades of Grey’s Sam Taylor-Johnson attached to direct. The story focuses on Calliope “Cal†Stephanides, whose family emigrated from Europe to Detroit in the 1920s, and follows the multigenerational experience of his Greek-American upbringing. As Cal grows up he comes to realize he is intersex, and his transformation is charted along with the dramatic changes in the world around him. There’s no network or streamer attached yet, but Ozark and House of Cards writer David Manson is set to write the script with Taylor Johnson.