The Adaptation Journey: The Michigan Plot
When is the right time to attach writers and pitch a tv show?
This is part of Inside the Tent, a series going behind the scenes of Campside’s award winning podcasts.
Listen to the The Michigan Plot now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
We’re back talking adaptations of Campside stories. We’re picking things up with the flip side of the coin discussed in the context of The Bering, where I made the case that great IP will find a way on a long enough timeline – and that timing is often one thing you just can’t control.
Today we’re going the other way and looking at how timing plays a role in decisions made while developing a project for the screen. When should you try to get someone to option a podcast (or other piece of material)? When do you go to a writer? A director? A star? When do you “take it out” to networks and try to sell it? There is no tried-and-true method for any of this, which is something that we can clearly see when we explore the Campside podcast “The Michigan Plot.”
The seventh season of the Campside + Sony Music franchise “Chameleon: The Michigan Plot,” was hosted by Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison, produced by Ryan Sweikert, story edited by Mike Meyer and overseen by Josh Dean. It details one of the strangest and most unsettling FBI sting operations in recent memory, all centered around a plan hatched by militia men in Michigan – with a tremendous amount of assistance from federal informants – to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
As Sarah Larson wrote in The New Yorker,
“‘The Michigan Plot’ delves into a truly tangled web of it all, revealing how F.B.I. informants trained, encouraged, and befriended militia members, helping to enable the kidnapping plot.” The show’s seven episodes contain a novel’s worth of character development and intrigue.
She goes on to write, “However ethically murky the F.B.I.’s methods were, they make for a very good podcast.”
Oh, sorry, that part wasn’t necessary to describe the project. I just wanted to sneak in the praise we got in The New Yorker. Won’t happen again!
So what we have is a twisty, interesting, and even important piece of narrative journalism that also has real potential for a scripted adaptation. Anytime there is a “novel’s worth of character development” you are thinking TV and deciding how to attack the road ahead. But there was a hidden component to “The Michigan Plot” that nobody listening to the podcast would ever pick up on – nor did it impact the making of the podcast whatsoever – which is that Campside was already working with a writing duo on the television adaptation before the podcast even came out.
We actually met our writers (Jeremy Miller and Dan Cohn) and heard about their Fargo-style vision for the Whitmer story the day before Michigan Plot co-hosts Ken and Jess pitched Campside’s Josh Dean.
Armed with this good luck, we were able to work in lockstep the whole way. Having writers on board to adapt the podcast helped give Campside and Sony Music (our terrific partner on all seasons of Chameleon) assurances that a TV project was viable, which has traditionally been an important part of the financial calculous when making prestige limited series in audio. And having a podcast in production gave us a constant trove of material to provide to Dan and Jeremy – and a release date to use as our true north, guiding when we would try to find producing partners and a studio for the adaptation.
And it worked perfectly accordingly to plan! The podcast came out, people loved it, our agents at UTA helped us build a slate of meetings, and one of those meetings led to an instant connection with producer Nellie Reed of the juggernaut production company Story Syndicate. Nellie has excellent taste, is passionate about creators, and loves journalism. (She played a major role in developing the adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Say Nothing” for FX.)
After we told her about “The Michigan Plot,” the strong connection extended to our writers Dan and Jeremy, then to Liz Garbus and Dan Cogan, the principals at Story Syndicate, and then to the folks at the studio where Story Syndicate has their deal.
Did you get all that?
A hop, skip, and a deal-making jump later, both the scripted adaptation and the doc series treatment of “The Michigan Plot” was set with Story Syndicate and raring to go. So we pitch all the networks next week, right? Well, this brings us back to timing.
The only concern anyone has with “The Michigan Plot” as a TV show is that it might register as political at a time when people are trying to avoid politics in their scripted entertainment. Mind you it is NOT political – it takes no sides and it’s actually a rollicking Coen Brothers-esque story of a tragicomic friendship between informant and target – but the concern is that networks will THINK it is.
And there is no time they are going to think that more than in the run up to an American Presidential election (which you might’ve noticed have gotten a bit weird of late). We’ve debated it over and over, but ultimately everyone agrees we have to wait until we are past the election, which means past the holidays, and probably past Inauguration Day too.
(And then, “we’ve got Sundance, so maybe we pick it up after that” – a little inside joke for all of you Hollywood people who know that line all too well.)
And thus, we wait. Despite having a project that everyone loves, that is pitched beautifully by our writers, and that we can’t wait for networks to hear. And it’s frustrating, but you do it because you want what is best for the project. And what is best for the project is to wait in this case. Because timing is everything.
Thanks for reading. Subscribe now for updates on all of Campside’s hit shows.
Adam