Showtime announced the pick-up of the new limited series Purity, based on the novel of the same name from best-selling author Jonathan Franzen, and starring and executive produced by internationally-acclaimed actor Daniel Craig.
Todd Field (Little Children, In the Bedroom) will write, direct and executive produce, along with executive producers Scott Rudin, Eli Bush, David Hare and Jonathan Franzen. Hare and Franzen will also serve as writers on the series. Field will direct every episode. Purity will be a 20-episode limited series set to air over the course of two years on Showtime, and production will begin in 2017. The announcement was made today by David Nevins, President and CEO, Showtime Networks Inc.
Purity is a morally complex story of youthful idealism, extreme loyalty and cold-blooded murder. Jonathan Franzen’s intricately plotted novel is populated by characters both hungry for the truth and desperate to hide it. From STASI offspring to Oakland anarchists, Franzen tracks his characters’ landscapes as varied as East Berlin, the Bolivian jungle, East Harlem walk-ups, and the California Redwoods. Purity is at once supremely ambitious in scope and intensely intimate in its treatment of character – a decades-spanning tragicomedy that builds to a contemporary climax.
“Jonathan Franzen’s Purity is an epic American novel that pulses with the energy of a psychological thriller. I whipped through it in a week,” said Nevins. “His gripping and timely story has attracted a powerhouse team – Todd Field, Scott Rudin, Eli Bush, David Hare, along with Franzen himself, and the brilliant Daniel Craig who is perfectly cast as the charismatic, mysterious ‘Andreas Wolf.’ Put it all together and Purity promises to be the kind of taut, long-form, serialized storytelling that is the best of premium television, and is precisely what we at Showtime aspire to deliver.”
