Showtime’s The President Is Missing has solved its first mystery — the drama series has hired a writer.
Invictus and Sherlock Holmes writer Anthony Peckham will adapt the novel by former President Bill Clinton and James Patterson. The drama series has also tapped Christopher McQuarrie (Mission: Impossible — Fallout) as an executive producer.
“Christopher McQuarrie is a master of complex and compelling filmmaking. We feel so lucky to have ensnared him along with the supremely talented Tony Peckham to adapt The President Is Missing,” Showtime Entertainment president Gary Levine said Thursday in a statement. “They are both extremely enthusiastic about bringing this uniquely authentic political thriller to life on Showtime.”
The pay cabler snagged rights to the best-selling novel — the first thriller written by a former president — in a competitive bidding process in September 2017, almost nine months before the book was published. It topped fiction best-seller lists for six weeks following its June 2018 publication and has sold more than a million copies in North America.
The series, which Showtime says is “inspired by” the novel, will center on a politically aimless and powerless vice president who is unexpectedly elevated to the presidency halfway into the administration’s first term. He then walks right into a secret, world-threatening crisis, both inside and outside the White House. With scandal and conspiracy on all sides, he has to choose between keeping his head down and toeing the party line or following a late-developing conscience and taking a stand.
McQuarrie and his wife and producing partner Heather McQuarrie will executive produce The President Is Missing via their Invisible Ink Productions; the company’s Jillian Share is a co-exec producer. Peckham, Patterson, Clinton, Bill Robinson and Leopoldo Gout are also exec producers.
