HBO adapting Serial season 3 into series with LeBron James producing

HBO is mining Serial for a potential serialized project, EW has learned.

Season 3 of the hit podcast, which followed cases in the courts of Cleveland is now being adapted into a limited series with LeBron James on board as an executive producer.

Shola Amoo, who wrote and directed the 2019 Sundance Film Festival pic The Last Tree, is writing, directing, and executive producing the untitled miniseries, which is currently in development. Serial Productions' Sarah Koenig, Emmanuel Dzotsi, and Alissa Shipp are set as executive producers alongside Maverick Carter, Jamal Henderson, Eric Oberland, and Kary Antholis.

The series will follow a young cop and the man he's accused of beating, while illuminating the deeply flawed inner workings of a middle-American courthouse and how the system impacts every person it touches: cop, lawyer, and citizens accused of and victimized by crimes.

Dzotsi spent a year developing Serial season 3 and recording inside courtrooms, judges' chambers, back hallways, and attorneys' offices. "Every case Emmanuel and I followed, there came a point where we thought: No, this can't be how it works," Koenig had said in a press release ahead of the podcast's premiere. "And then we were like, Oh! Oh my god. This is how it works! This is how it happens! People who work in the system, or have been through the system, they know this. But millions more people do not. And for the past year I've had this urgent feeling of wanting to kind of hold open the courthouse door, and wave people inside. Because things are happening — shocking things, fascinating things — in plain sight."

This is the latest attempt to turn a podcast from Serial Productions into a screen adaptation. Nice White Parents, the podcast about the forces shaping public schools that launched after Serial Productions became part of The New York Times in 2020, has a pilot commitment at HBO with executive producers Issa Rae and Adam McKay for a potential series. S-Town is also being developed as a movie.

In 2019, HBO debuted The Case Against Adnan Syed, a four-part docuseries that tracked the same subject as Serial season 1.

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