Showtime has announced that they’ve acquired the rights to The President Is Missing, an upcoming thriller co-written by former President Bill Clinton and prolific bestselling author James Patterson.
“Bringing The President Is Missing to Showtime is a coup of the highest order,” Showtime Networks president and CEO David Nevins said. “The pairing of President Clinton with fiction’s most gripping storyteller promises a kinetic experience, one that the book world has salivated over for months and that now will dovetail perfectly into a politically relevant, character-based action series for our network.”
To be published in June 2018, The President Is Missing follows the disappearance of a sitting United States President and the fallout that would come from a destabilized government. There’s no indication yet of when the series adaptation would debut or whether it could get on the air before the novel.
The President Is Missing joins a Showtime slate that includes blue-collar family dramedy Shameless; spy thriller Homeland, which had a political arc in its most recent season; Hollywood fixer drama Ray Donovan; relationship drama The Affair; and financial drama Billions. The network’s upcoming projects feature the likes of Purity, an adaptation of the Jonathan Franzen novel that will star Daniel Craig once his duties to the Bond franchise conclude; Lena Waithe’s The Chi, a coming-of-age drama about six interrelated Chicagoans; and Escape at Dannemora, a limited series retelling of a real-life prison break in upstate New York, which spawned a massive manhunt for two convicted murderers who were aided in their escape by a married female prison employee with whom they both became sexually entangled.
