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Exclusive: Gladys Knight, the Empress of Soul who recorded hits such as “Midnight Train to Georgia” and “I Heard It Through The Grapevine,” is gearing up for a scripted mini-series about her life.

Knight has teamed up with Cineflix Productions to develop the series and she will exec produce through her Empress of Soul Productions banner.

It’s suggested that the project could run similar to The Crown, taking on different periods of Knight’s life.

If the project progresses, Knight would become the latest soul legend to have a series set around her; Cynthia Erivo starred as Aretha Franklin in the third iteration of Nat Geo’s Genius anthology last year.

Cineflix Productions is coming off the success of feature doc Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, from Nancy Buirski, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

The company previously worked with another Motown legend,...

Exclusive: Sony Pictures Television will link sixteen aspiring scribes with industry professionals and mentors for its six-week Diverse Writers Program.

Participating writers will have discussions with a number of creative executives, producers, seasoned writers and showrunners with the focus of honing their skills in writing scripted television. They will also network with industry professionals and be assigned a mentor from Spt’s pool of producers and scribes.

The writing program will conclude with the participating writers meeting with Spt showrunners and producers to be considered for potential staffing opportunities on U.S. projects. Of the sixteen participating scribes, Spt will select four with whom to develop pilot scripts for both comedies and dramas.

“We believe it’s imperative that underrepresented voices have the opportunity to tell diverse and authentic stories that haven’t been told before and to develop into tomorrow’s preeminent showrunners,” said Jeff Frost, President of Sony Pictures Television Studios.

The Lifetime network has long had a reputation for mediocre films and dramas with a campy aesthetic.In recent years, it has made an effort to distance itself from that renown, investing in the kind of content that draws a larger, more mainstream audience — and hopefully awards — as well as overall industry esteem. One such project just might be the biopic, “The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel,” which premiered on April 11 to much fanfare, especially resonating most with one specific demo: black women. As a man who watched the film, and didn’t quite understand its appeal, instead of writing a critique of it, I asked black women viewers to share their thoughts on why it resounded so much.

To be sure, Lifetime hasn’t completely abandoned the kind of tabloidy women-in-peril stories that they once thrived on, but it has bolstered its efforts recently with Emmy-nominated films, from...

Lorena Bobbitt’s story is getting the biopic treatment.

Lifetime has greenlit “I Was Lorena Bobbitt,” a feature about the woman who became a household name and made tabloid headlines when she cut off her husband’s penis with a knife in 1993 after years of abuse.

Bobbitt was the subject of a Jordan Peele-produced Amazon docuseries which came out less than a year ago, and this new retelling has Bobbitt herself on board as an executive producer. Casting on the project is underway and production will begin later this month. The film, announced by A+E Networks president of programming Rob Sharenow at Lifetime’s Television Critics’ Association winter tour press day, will follow Bobbitt’s “journey from a wide-eyed, immigrant bride to a battered wife into an unlikely media sensation.”

“I Was Lorena Bobbitt” hails from Cineflix International and executive producers Andy Streitfeld, Jeff Vanderwal and Charles Tremayne. Barbara Nance...