In one of the first major pieces of new development outside of the Breaking Bad universe, Vince Gilligan has signed on to write and executive produce Raven, a limited series for HBO about Jim Jones, the infamous leader of the Peoples Temple cult who led his followers to a mass murder-suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978.
On Raven, Breaking Bad creator/executive producer Gilligan is reuniting with the AMC series’ executive producer/director Michelle MacLaren, who is set to direct the limited series. The two are executive producing the project with actress Octavia Spencer, who had optioned the source material — the nonfiction book Raven: The Untold Story of Jim Jones and His People by Tim Reiterman, a journalist who survived the events in Guyana — more than four years ago. Reilly Smith, who had secured the rights to the book with Spencer, will co-produce. Sony Pictures TV, where Gilligan and his High Bridge Prods. are based, is the studio. There are no plans for Spencer to act in the project.
Raven is described as the definitive history of Peoples Temple from its idealistic beginnings to its terrible end in Jonestown. The adaptation will focus on Jim Jones but also on his followers, who, by and large, were ordinary people of good will. It tells the mysterious story of how so many of them came to give up their lives for this man.