AMC Studios Opens Writers’ Room For Peter Ocko’s Utopian Drama ‘Moonhaven’

EXCLUSIVE: AMC Studios has opened a writers’ room for Moonhaven, an AI drama from writer-producer Peter Ocko (Lodge 49, Black Sails). The project is being developed as part of AMC’s scripts-to-series model, which includes the commissioning of a writers’ room to develop additional material and produce backup scripts for projects the network brass are high on. In success, the projects move from the writers room straight to a series order. Ocko, who is under an overall deal with AMC Studios, would serve as showrunner if Moonhaven moves ahead as a series. Veteran producer Deb Spera has joined him as a non-writing executive producer on the project.

Moonhaven focuses on Bella Sway, a lunar cargo pilot and smuggler 100 years in the future who finds herself accused of a crime and marooned on Moonhaven, a utopian community set on a 500 square mile Garden of Eden built on the Moon to find solutions to the problems that will soon end civilization on Mother Earth. A skeptic in Paradise, Bella is sucked into a conspiracy to gain control of the artificial intelligence responsible for Moonhaven’s miracles and teams with a local detective to stop the forces that want to destroy Earth’s last hope before they are destroyed themselves.

“What’s so intriguing to us about this show is that it is a suspenseful thriller that speaks to the issues we’re dealing with today – global warming; social, economic and racial disharmony; the notion that we need to act now or risk Earth becoming a dystopian planet and even the emergence of AI and whether it’s an enhancement to our lives or a threat,” said Dan McDermott, president of original programming for AMC Networks and co-head of AMC Studios. “Combined with the fact that a handful of billionaires and countries are actively predicting and working toward colonizing other planets. The subject matter of this show is absolutely on point with the world we’re currently living in and is a rich and fertile palette for Peter’s engaging storytelling, we’re excited to probe it.”

Two recent AMC projects that received straight-to-series orders through the scripts-to-series model include the upcoming Kevin Can F**K Himself and 61st Street.

Ocko most recently served as executive producer/showrunner on AMC’s Lodge 49, which ran for two seasons. His previous credits include being co-showrunner on Pushing Daisies, and co-exec producer on Black Sails, Elementary and The Office, and consulting producer on The Leftovers. He began his career as a staff writer on the HBO series Not Necessarily The News, followed by a string of 1990s comedies, including Parker Lewis Can’t Lose and Dinosaurs. He later segued to drama, writing on Dead Like Me and Boston Legal, and then created and ran the CBS medical drama 3 Lbs starring Stanley Tucci.