Reed Morano & Jane Featherstone To Adapt ‘The Power’ for Amazon

Broadchurch producer Jane Featherstone is teaming with The Handmaid’s Tale’s Reed Morano for a global thriller based on Naomi Alderman’s book The Power for Amazon.

Featherstone’s Sister Pictures is making 10-part series The Power for the streaming service after optioning the book in 2016. The show was unveiled Wednesday at TCA.

Alderman is adapting her own book and exec producing with Featherstone, The Bisexual’s Naomi de Pear and Morano with Trust and Taboo’s Tim Bricknell as producer. It will be shot internationally and go into production later this year. Endeavor Content handled the sale.

The Power, which was on President Barack Obama’s list of his favorite books from 2017, lives in a world where all teenage girls develop the power to electrocute people at will. It’s hereditary, it’s inbuilt, and it can’t be taken away from them.

Over the first season and beyond, the series will follow its cast of characters from London to Arizona, Nigeria to Moldova, as the Power evolves from a tingle in teenagers’ collarbones to a complete reversal of the power balance of the world.

“The Power is a timely, provocative series that will powerfully resonate with the book’s passionate fans worldwide,” said Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios. “We’re delighted to be working with renowned writer Naomi Alderman, the talented team at Sister Pictures led by Jane Featherstone and the visionary Reed Morano, to bring this thrilling, multi-layered series to our Prime Video members around the world.”

“I’m thrilled beyond words that The Power will be broadcast around the world by Amazon,” added Alderman. “Jennifer Salke and her team have had a huge and obvious passion for the project from the very first meeting – as well as a vision for how the show can reach the widest possible audience. The story is a global one, about the lives of women and men everywhere in the world, so I’m hugely excited that The Power will be sparking conversation and debate essentially… everywhere. We’re going to make something revolutionary and, dare I say it, electrifying.”

“From the moment we read Naomi Alderman’s propulsive, illuminating and ground-breaking novel, the whole team at Sister Pictures knew we wanted to work with her to bring it to life,” said Featherstone and de Pear. “We are so delighted that together we have found our home at Amazon and the perfect director in Reed, where we will be able to make a show that foregrounds Naomi’s extraordinary characters as they journey through the biggest reversal in human history.”

“Naomi’s story is like nothing I’ve seen and made me feel things so viscerally that I have honestly never felt,” said Morano. “I cannot wait to dig deep with Naomi, Sister Pictures, and Amazon Studios into this profound and masterful vision of the complex dynamics of our world reversed.”