Showtime Has Picked Benedict Cumberbatch To Headline Melrose

 

Indiewire is reporting that Benedict Cumberbatch has signed on to star in Melrose, a five-episode series set to air on Showtime. Based on Edward St. Aubyn’s novels, production will get underway this summer and will see the actor star play Patrick Melrose, “an aristocratic and outrageously funny playboy who struggles to overcome the damage inflicted by a horribly abusive father and the mother who tacitly condoned the behavior.”

The literary series totals 5 books and apparently, the plan is for each one to be adapted into an hour-long episode.

In a press release put out by Showtime and Sky Atlantic, the new project was described as such “The limited series will be a true television saga, both gripping and humorous from Nicholls’ adaptation, with a dramatic sweep that encompasses the South of France in the 1960s, New York in the 1980s and Britain in the early 2000’s.”