Scott Frank Builds a Universe: The Quiet Architect Wins Again
Frank has also confirmed that his A24 adaptation of Red Harvest — Dashiell Hammett's brutal, beautiful novel about a hired gun who keeps cleaning up other people's messes — is a limited series, not a film.
There is a particular kind of television writer who operates like a jeweller — every cut deliberate, every facet placed to catch the light at exactly the right angle. Scott Frank is one of them, which is why the news that Netflix has bought his novel *Shaker* for a limited series lands less like a headline and more like confirmation of something you already knew was coming.
This is the man behind *The Queen's Gambit* — still the most elegant piece of limited television made in the last decade, a show about chess that was never actually about chess — and *Godless*, which rewrote the grammar of the Western without announcing that it was doing so. When Frank commits to a format, he doesn't just work within it. He finds the load-bearing wall and redesigns from there.
What's worth paying attention to isn't just *Shaker* on its own. Frank has also confirmed that his A24 adaptation of *Red Harvest* — Dashiell Hammett's brutal, beautiful novel about a hired gun who keeps cleaning up other people's messes — is a limited series, not a film. And beyond that: Nabokov's *Laughter in the Dark* and *The Cone Gatherers* are both in development, sitting on the deck like planes waiting for a runway. The man is not coasting. He is building something.
Meanwhile, the conversation around the 2027 Oscar season is already shifting in interesting ways. *Project Hail Mary* has real momentum — the kind that builds slowly and then suddenly isn't slow anymore — and Andrew Scott appears to have done something that nobody predicted with enough force, which is the best kind of surprise. The films that matter at awards time are rarely the ones that announced their intentions loudest at Cannes.
On the animated front, *Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia* from Science Saru — Naoko Yamada's studio, which gave us *The Colors Within* — is quietly positioning itself as the most interesting anime of the year. Historical fiction, female direction, and an international co-production that refuses to be easily categorised. I'll be watching.
And then there's *Ghostbusters: Night Shift* on Netflix, attempting to bridge the original 1984 films to the 2020 sequels through a serialised canon. The *Clone Wars* comparison is instructive and slightly depressing. Not everything needs a mythology. Sometimes a ghost is just a ghost.
Scott Frank knows the difference. That's exactly why he keeps getting the call.
