Oliver Sacks Medical Drama Lands Pilot Order At NBC – Deadline 

NBC has ordered the pilot for Wolf, a one-hour medical drama from writer-producer Michael Grassi, producer-director Lee Toland Krieger and executive producer Greg Berlanti. The project comes from Warner Bros Television, where all three are under overall deals.

This is the project’s third incarnation, after previously receiving a put pilot commitment at Fox in 2019 with Alex Berger to write. Krieger remains with the project from its previous iteration, and he will direct the pilot.

Wolf is inspired by the books The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks. It follows a revolutionary, larger-than-life neurologist and his team of interns as they explore the last great frontier, the human mind, while also grappling with their own relationships and mental health.

Berlanti will executive producer alongside Sarah Schechter and Leigh London Redman for Berlanti Productions. Henrik Bastin and Melissa Aouate will executive producer via Fabel Entertainment, and Jonathan Cavendish, Andy Serkis and Will Tennant will executive produce for The Imaginarium.

Sacks, who died in 2015 at 82, was a humanist, a passionate explorer of the human consciousness and arguably the most famous doctor of modern times. Dubbed by the New York Times a “poet laureate of contemporary medicine,” Sacks dove into dedicated his life to studying the strangest and most mind-boggling brain disorders in the world as a window into human consciousness, and he believed in remaking our approach to the mentally ill and neuro-atypical.

His book Awakenings was made into a Best Picture Oscar-nominated 1990 film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

Fabrik Entertainment, a Red Arrow Studios company, had originally been attached to the project after teaming with Serkis and Cavendish’s The Imaginarium to produce a TV drama series inspired by Sacks in 2018. Sacks’ life also was the subject of a TV drama project that received a script commitment at NBC in 2013. Titled Sparks, that project was executive produced by Medium creator Glenn Gordon Caron and Michael London (Milk).

Krieger directed and executive produced the pilot for the Fox drama series Prodigal Son. He also directed and executive produced the pilot for Lifetime/Netflix’s hit drama You; directed multiple episodes of the CW’s Riverdale, including the pilot; and the first two episodes of Riverdale offshoot the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix, on which he was an exec producer.

Grassi also has a history with Berlanti, having written multiple episodes of the CW’s Riverdale. He also created the series’ spinoff Katy Keene, which also aired on the CW. He most recently wrote multiple episodes of Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin on HBO Max.