How does one turn a movie about a reality TV show into a scripted TV show?  That’s the question on Paramount’s brain, as word comes that the studio is developing a TV series adaptation of the 1998 film The Truman Show.  Directed by Peter Weir from a brilliant script by Andrew Niccol, the pic stars Jim Carrey as a man who begins to realize that his entire life has been/is being filmed as part of a reality television show.  It’s an excellent film that turned out to be quite prescient about the future state of entertainment, but it has a very definitive beginning, middle, and end.  Regardless, a TV series adaptation is in the works.

Hit the jump for more on the proposed The Truman Show TV series

News of the proposed television endeavor comes courtesy of The Wrap, which adds little more than the simple fact that Paramount TV is developing a series inspired by The Truman Show.  It’s tough to imagine how the adaptation would work, but it’s possible that Paramount could go the “limited series” route.  The current trend in television is to have a limited run for show, ensuring that it stays creatively juicy without hitting the point where it's just treading water.

It’s essentially a rebranded version of the “miniseries,” but HBO had massive success with True Detective and there are a number of other similar endeavors on the horizon: Fox has the 12-episode 24: Live Another Day, FX has the 10-episode Fargo, and FX also intends for The Strain to have a limited run of three to five seasons.  One imagines a Truman Show series would need a bit more than 10 episodes to carry out the full arc, but a run of 20-30 episodes feels like a solid number.

As there are few details, it sounds like this is all still early days.  Paramount hasn’t even set the potential series up at a network yet, but they are indeed developing the idea in addition to their impending Terminator TV series reboot, which is intended to be canonically connected to the upcoming feature Terminator: Genesis.