J.K. Rowling’s second-most-muggly books (after the small-town politics drama The Casual Vacancy), the Cormoran Strike novels published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, as it was announced in 2014, being adapted as a BBC One limited series, and news just broke that HBO has acquired the US and Canadian rights to broadcast it as well. (The premium cable network seems to have a thing for broadcasting limited series based on Rowling’s muggly post-HP output.)
It gets complicated describing the format of this thing, not because it’s so wild, but rather because it entails the usage of two of those vague and seemingly but not actually interchangeable TV series terms that get thrown around so often. The limited series (which supposedly means that a network sees potential for renewal, though it could be stand-alone), as it were, is, per Deadline, actually made up of three separate “event series,” a term that is the vaguest of any of them, but here seems to three smaller series within the series. The novel The Cuckoo’s Calling will be spread across three hours, while the second and third novels, The Silkworm and Career of Evil, will each have two hours to unfold.
The Sherlock Holmes-reminiscent series will star Tom Burke (of BBC’s War and Peace miniseries) as Cormoran Strike, a private detective/war veteran/rock star’s illegitimate son, who solves cases the police can’t crack alongside his assistant, Robin Venetia Ellacott.