Ridley Scott, Lynda Obst, and the American panic industry are developing an Ebola-centered TV show based on the 1994 book The Hot Zone. According to THR, Scott and Obst had been developing a limited series for some time, though when they first optioned Richard Preston’s book 20 years ago, the idea was to make a feature film. That never got off the ground (curse you, Outbreak), so now the plan is to make a miniseries of some kind, though a home for said series has not yet been found. The Hot Zone started out as a 1992 New Yorker article, “Crisis in the Hot Zone,” and Preston is apparently writing a new article as we speak, which will be incorporated into the potential TV show. Somewhere, there’s a production designer polishing his or her résumé and whipping up all kinds of fake vomits and hemorrhagic discharges, and trying to make each look more dangerously viral than the last.
