Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle gets TV show from Fargo showrunner

Now, the in-demand writer has been tapped by FX to develop a new short-term series based on one of Kurt Vonnegut’s best loved sci-fi novels, Cat’s Cradle.

To find out more about the book from Vonnegut himself, watch below.

However, if there’s anyone who can pull off adapting an idiosyncratic tone without resorting to mimicry it’s Hawley, who nailed the seemingly impossible task of adapting a Coen brothers movie to series with aplomb. The “Cat’s Cradle” announcement comes on the heels of another Hawley project at FX – the previously announced “X-Men” series, “Legion.” Producer Simon Kinberg recently called the upcoming series the “Breaking Bad of superhero stories”, and Hawley will pen and executive-produce the pilot. Published in 1963, it reflects the concerns of the Cold War era, but its themes are still relevant today, and will be as long as science, war, and religion are around. The first and the current second season of Fargo, an anthology series, both have 10-episode arcs with mostly self-contained narratives. The characters wind up on the fictional island of San Lorenzo, where the local population worships a unusual religion with even stranger origins.

Vonnegut’s voice is so distinctive, and Cat’s Cradle so weird, that my immediate instinct is to worry that Hawley will screw it up. And while the idea of anyone else on the planet having the audacity to “supplement” Vonnegut’s original work makes me furious, I actually trust Hawley to enhance the book while staying true to it-and that’s what’s really important.