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Exclusive: Parkes+MacDonald has acquired the television rights to two titles – Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton and Jodi Meadows’ New York Times bestselling novel My Lady Jane, and forthcoming thriller novel People Like Her by Ellery Lloyd, for series development.

My Lady Jane, one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Young Adult Books of the Year in 2016, is a comic supernatural tale of true love and high adventure, set in an alternate England in 1553, a country on the verge of civil war. The planned series takes the tale of one of history’s most tragic heroines but reimagines it with an uplifting twist: the damsel in distress saves herself — and then the kingdom.

Gemma Burgess is set to pen the adaptation for My Lady Jane and executive produce with Parkes+MacDonald’s Laurie MacDonald and Walter Parkes. Parkes+MacDonald’s Maggie Cahill will produce.

People Like Her, by Ellery Lloyd, the pseudonym...

Really, I mean Preston Sturges' Hotel Haywire, because nobody's too interested in George Archainbaud, a Paramount contract director who had been directing for 20 years without helming a really memorable film (Thirteen Women, an uncomfortably racist pre-Code with Myrna Loy, is as exciting as it gets, and even that one is remembered chiefly for featuring the girl who threw herself off the Hollywood sign), He would continue for another 20, moving from B-westerns into TV westerns, without making anything else of particular note.Sturges wrote the script as part of his plan to get a long-term contract at Paramount. To particularly appeal to the suits there, he filled the story with roles for Paramount stars such as Mary Boland, Charles Ruggles, Fred MacMurray and Burns & Allen, none of whom were necessarily famous enough to carry a movie, but whose combined star-power might make an attractive investment for studio or future ticket-buyers.