EXCLUSIVE: The series adaptation of Raven Kennedy’s fantasy novels is picking up steam with Kate Rorick attached to serve as showrunner of the project.
Deadline revealed at the end of 2022 that Peter Guber’s Mandalay Television was developing an adaptation of Kennedy’s Plated Prisoner series, which includes five books: Gild, Glint, Gleam, Glow, and Gold.
Rorick has previously served as showrunner of Leverage: Redemption, the Freevee revival of the TNT action crime series. She has also written on series including TNT’s The Librarians and Freeform’s Marvel series Cloak & Dagger.
Mandalay Television will begin taking out the project to market over the next couple of months.
The books are a new take on the story of King Midas and how everything he touches turns to gold. They have been a viral hit on Instagram’s Book Club and BookTok.
The story follows Auren, a twenty-five year old woman, who has been gold-touched by King Midas. Her skin, her hair – everything is gold except for the whites of her eyes and her teeth. Midas saved her and she gave him her heart. She is kept in a gilded cage on the highest level of the castle, but she is safe. Until a deal is struck. Her trust is broken in the one person she thought would never betray her. Her love challenged, she is forced to contemplate if the King Midas she knows is an illusion, and the people outside her gilded cage will make her wish that she never had to leave it in the first place.
Gild was first self-published by Kennedy in October 2020 followed by Glint in January 2021, Gleam in May 2021 and Glow in June 2022 with Gold, the final book in the series released in 2023.
Mandalay Television is a division of Mandalay Entertainment, the company founded by former Sony Pictures boss and Rain Man and Flashdance producer Peter Guber. Recent credits include the TV adaptation of Amazon’s I Know What You Did Last Summer and it was involved in Apple’s development of Negro League Baseball project If You Were Only White: The Life of Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige with Magic Johnson, a co-investor with Guber in the LA Dodgers.
The series is being shepherded by Mandalay Television Development Executive Vanessa Johnston.
Rorick is repped by Kailey Marsh at Five Line and IAG.
