Moonlight Writer Tarell Alvin McCraney Is Writing a South Florida TV Series

TV viewers will soon get to see South Florida in a whole new light. Tarell Alvin McCraney, the acclaimed playwright who penned the play that inspired the Oscar-winning film Moonlight, has been given the green light to create a TV series set in South Florida and inspired by his experiences growing up in Liberty City.

The minds behind the as-yet-untitled project are among some of the most acclaimed names in Hollywood. In addition to McCraney, who will create, write, and executive-produce the show, actor Michael B. Jordan of Creed and Fruitvale Station is an executive producer. Warner Horizon Scripted Television, the studio that fostered Ava DuVernay's series Queen Sugar, will back McCraney's series. And it'll air on OWN, the TV network run by Oprah Winfrey.

According to Deadline, the series will "explore the precarious balance needed for the making of a man." A 14-year-old main character, dealing with the death of a close friend and struggling to help his mother dig them both out of poverty, faces a choice: Commit to either "the streets that raised him or the higher education that may offer him a way out."

The news is an apt reward for one of the creators of the most talked-about film of last Oscars season. McCraney, along with Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, won the 2017 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay before a flubbed Best Picture announcement made history at the Oscars — and ultimately gave Moonlight both the coveted statue and an extrabright spotlight. (Jenkins is working on his own adaptation for the small screen, turning Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad into a series for Amazon.)
McCraney grew up in Liberty City and attended New World School of the Arts before studying at Yale Drama School and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He soon became the city's best-known playwright through the success of shows such as his Brothers/Sisters Plays trilogy, which earned him the Outstanding Playwright Award form the New York Times. He staged productions across the world, including an "action-thriller version" of Hamlet, before teaming up with Jenkins to tell Moonlight's story of a boy growing into a man in Liberty City.

Moonlight was praised for telling a South Florida story no film had ever brought to the big screen before. There's no reason to expect McCraney's TV series will accomplish anything less.