Brace yourselves,The OAfans - we’re finally getting another series fromBrit MarlingandZal Batmanglij, and it sounds like it’s going to be another sprawling, character-driven mystery. While taking the virtual stage at the Television Critics Association press tour today,FX announcedRetreat, a new limited series written and directed by Marling and Batmanglij, with Marling also set to appear in a key role.
Per the press release,
“The Retreat is a mystery series with a new kind of detective at the helm — a gen Z amateur sleuth named Darby Hart. Darby and 11 other guests are invited by a reclusive billionaire to participate in a Retreat at a remote and dazzling location. When one of the other guests is found dead, Darby must fight to prove it was murder against a tide of competing interests and before the killer takes another life.”
Following the initial announcement, FX ChairmanJohn Landgrafspoke with the press and offered a few more intriguing details about the project. First thing’s first, Marling will not star as the lead character:
“Brit is not the lead character in retreat. It’s a very young female character. There is a great and important role in Retreat and… I think she’s inclined to play her.”
Landgraf also revealed a bit more about the series’ setting, which won’t take place exclusively at the “remote and dazzling location” of the Retreat itself, but includes a variety of locales. Asked if the series was greenlit with the post-COVID mindset of single location locked sets, a laThe White LotusandNine Perfect Strangers, Landgraf teased a fairly expansive setting, and what he loved about the character of Darby Hart:
“Okay so, Retreat actually does have a pretty good chunk of it that’s set in an ultra-luxury hotel, adjacent to a glacier in a very forbidding northern place, but it has a fair chunk of it that actually takes place in the desert, and in various different other locales.
So, so the answer is no it really wasn’t a COVID decision. It really was just, I absolutely loved what – And that’s not just me, it’s all FX team, just absolutely love what Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij came to us with. Which was a sort of radical reconceptualization of this sort of whodunnit, where they had a really really original set of characters and in particular really strong and original young woman at the center of the story, whose backstory and present-tense story, emotional story, really form a strong emotional core. There’s obviously a mystery murder mystery that unfolds in the show too, but it’s a really distinctive and unique show and, but actually not that easy to produce to tell you the truth, so it’s not an especially COVID-friendly show.”
Marling and Batmanglij will also executive produce alongsideTransparent’sAndrea Sperling.
KEEP READING:A Eulogy for ‘The OA’: The Lasting Lessons of Brit Marling’s Groundbreaking Series
