Apple picks up Sam Esmail's Metropolis series

Apple has announced that it's picked up a new science fiction series: Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail's long-in-the-works take on Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, one of the best-known classics in the genre.

According to Apple, it's given a series order to the project, which it describes as a "new drama inspired by the seminal Fritz Lang science fiction work of the same name," and that Esmail will write, direct, and showrun the entire series.

Esmail's been working on this particular project since 2016. The Hollywood Reporter revealed the project that December, noting that it was part of the overall deal that he'd signed with Universal Pictures (where he's also been working on a version of Battlestar Galactica for NBC/Peacock), and that at the time, the project was in the very early development. It was described as a miniseries, and it would take place in a "future society where wealthy industrialists rule the vast city from high-rise tower complexes, while a lower class of underground-dwelling workers toil constantly to operate the machines that provide its power."

The original film was incredibly influential when it came to showcasing a dystopian society, and there's an entire subgenre devoted to this exact plot, and there's no small irony about how Apple, one of the biggest tech companies in the world, is financing the project. (I'm reminded of a snarky post that I made about Apple and Foundation, in which I highlighted a bit of Asimov's book in which he described planned obsolescence.)

Still, Apple's roster of original shows has been pretty good: I enjoyed Foundation, and For All Mankind is one of the best science fiction shows I've ever seen. If they can thread the needle with this as another far-looking project, I think it'll be a good addition to their roster.

There's no details on who'll be cast in the project or when it'll be released, but I imagine that with a series order, we'll start to see casting and other details in a couple of months.