Season two of Orange Is the New Black lands on Netflix June 6, but that’s not the only show that Jenji Kohan is working on these days. There’s also a Salem-set series in development at HBO, and we caught up with Kohan last night at the Time 100 Gala to ask her about it.
“We forget that the Puritans were young, hardy people in their 20s, and they were human, so it was all this insane stuff that’s going on, and they were sexy and mean and all those things that you would expect — human nature was essentially intact,” she says. “They were being fruitful and multiplying in their new land. Scarlet Letter.” The show is still in its early stages — “hopefully it will see light of day,” Kohan told us — but it would paint a broad picture of life in Salem. “We don’t really answer the question whether these women were witches, we just present a lot of situations, and again, it’s open to interpretation. We cover it from a lot of angles,” she says. Despite Kohan’s track record, nothing’s quite a done deal yet. “This time next year, I could be locked up in the madhouse,” Kohan jokes. “We’ll see what happens.”
