AMC Sets Series On Black Lives Matter Book ‘They Can’t Kill Us All’

AMC has put in development a drama based on Wesley Lowery’s bestselling nonfiction book They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice. It comes from Brad Weston’s Makeready and writer LaToya Morgan (Into the Badlands, Turn: Washington’s Spies).

Published in 2016 by Little, Brown & Company, the book was acquired by Makeready last fall. It examines how decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs has led to the high-profile cases of police brutality in Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore and elsewhere and the birth of Black Lives Matter movement seeking justice for the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray.

Written by Morgan, who is under an overall deal at AMC, the potential series also will reflect current events and race relations through the stories and voices of fictional characters. Morgan will executive produce with Makeready founder and CEO Weston and creative heads Pam Abdy and Scott Nemes.

Lowery, a reporter at The Washington Post, was a lead on the paper’s “Fatal Force” project, a database that tracked 990 police shootings in 2015. The project won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2016.

They Can’t Kill Us All joins the growing development slate of Makeready’s television division, headed by Nemes, which funds development and can deficit finance series, with Entertainment One handling international distribution. The slate also includes a series adaptation of Rocket Men, Robert Kurson’s upcoming book about the Apollo 8 odyssey; the Untitled David James Kelly project, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson’s Appian Way; Old City Blues, by screenwriter Arash Amel, based on the Boom graphic novel; Catching Out, from writer/executive producer Amy Harris and executive producer Chloe Grace Moretz; and the Jonás Cuarón-written drama Undocumented America, based on manuscript by journalist and DACA recipient Karla Cornejo Villavicencio about undocumented immigrants across America.

Morgan is repped by Echo Lake Entertainment, CAA, and Rob Szymanski.