Apple TV is in early development on an ongoing series based on Colson Whitehead’s bestselling Harlem trilogy, Variety has learned. The studio has acquired the rights to all three novels, with Aric Avelino and Graham Yost adapting the books for television.
The trilogy is set in New York and spans the 1950s through the 1980s, blending crime fiction with social satire as it follows Ray Carney, a Harlem furniture salesman who cannot help but be drawn into the criminal underworld around him. The first novel, Harlem Shuffle, published in 2021, follows Carney in the 1950s and early 1960s as the neighborhood undergoes sweeping economic and cultural change. Crook Manifesto, published in 2023, tracks Carney’s increasingly complicated moral compromises through the 1960s and 1970s against a backdrop of riots and the rise of blaxploitation culture. The third installment, Cool Machine, published July 21 and already featured on Barack Obama’s summer reading list, carries Carney’s story into the 1980s.
Avelino and Yost will adapt and executive produce alongside Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-winning director of Moonlight and Mufasa, Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak of Pastel, Melissa Bernstein of Special Interests and Whitehead himself.
The adaptation marks another major screen translation of Whitehead’s work. Jenkins previously directed the 2021 Amazon Prime Video miniseries adaptation of Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad. His other Pulitzer Prize winner, The Nickel Boys, was adapted into a 2024 film directed by RaMell Ross that earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.