Rewatch Gilmore Girls from the beginning now, because when the Obamas are done developing their new line-up of Netflix projects, you’re going to have wall-to-wall new content to watch. On Friday, Barack and Michelle’s production company, Higher Ground, announced the roster of movies and shows they’re working on for the platform, including a film adaptation of author Mohsin Hamid’s 2017’s Exit West, which follows a couple who, along with other refugees, are able to transport to other parts of the world through supernatural doorways; Riz Ahmed will star, as well as executive-produce, while Yann Demange will direct.
Higher Ground’s other feature projects include Tenzing, a biopic about Tenzing Norgay, the sherpa who first surmounted Everest with Edmund Hillary, from director Jennifer Peedom and Lion writer Luke Davies, based on the 2003 Ed Douglas book Tenzing: Hero of Everest, in addition to the sci-fi picture Satellite from writer Ola Shokunbi, and director Tayarisha Poe’s The Young Wife, which “follows Celestina, 29, on the day of her first wedding. Or not a wedding, exactly, but a party. A party where there’s movement, and Celestina is out of sync. The guests flood in; a storm approaches.”
Over on the television side of things, the Obamas bring you Firekeeper’s Daughter, a YA thriller based on author Angeline Boulley’s upcoming debut novel about an “18-year-old Native girl as she reluctantly goes undercover in a police investigation on her Ojibwe reservation,” with Mickey Fisher and Wenonah Wilms set to co-write and Fisher to showrun. And for everyone who has been desperate to see something that isn’t the walls of their own homes, they’ve got Great National Parks, “a natural history docuseries that will explore some of the most wondrous national parks and wild spaces on Earth,” from Wild Space Productions and Blue Planet II filmmaker James Honeyborne.
The projects join the previously announced Higher Ground shows Ada Twist, Scientist, an animated STEM show for preschoolers based on the book series from Andrea Beaty and illustrator David Roberts; as well as The G Word With Adam Conover, a hybrid comedy about governmental dysfunction based on Michael Lewis’s 2019 book Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy.
