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Briana Middleton Photo: Amy Sussman
We’re a few dozen months short of it being a cool 100 years since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis premiered, and Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail is preparing to adapt the film (and the 1925 novel it was based on) into a new series for Apple TV Plus. It’s been about a year since there was last news on this, but now—much like the harrowing forward march of progress, wherein the working man is crushed under the weight of the ruling class’ greed—there seems to be some actual progress happening for Esmail’s Metropolis.
According to Deadline, Briana Middleton (of Apple’s upcoming film Sharper, plus Prime Video’s The Tender Bar) has joined Metropolis as Finnie Polito, a character that Deadline says has been invented for the show. That means, apparently, the first role cast in the adaptation is not the person who makes the robot, or the robot itself (herself?), but a new character who must be absolutely crucial to whatever Esmail’s planning. And that’s exciting! If Esmail is doing something with this beyond expanding the film into a series, especially with the money and support of Apple TV+, it could be really cool. It is, after all, the first TV project he’s writing and directing since Mr. Robot, and that show did take some curious sci-fi turns as it went along.
Metropolis, for those who missed it in theaters the first time around (in Berlin in the ‘20s), is set in a futuristic, heavily industrialized city where the wealthy upperclass people live high up in big skyscrapers and the workers who keep the city running live underground. The son of the city’s ruler has one interaction with regular working people and is immediately radicalized to their cause, which involves searching for a messianic mediator who can bring the two classes together and an inventor who has built an advanced robot woman.
