Stephen King’s Bestseller Billy Summers Is Getting a Limited Series

According to an exclusive report at Deadline, J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot is putting together a limited series package based on the Stephen King bestselling crime novel Billy Summers, published by Scribner on August 3, 2021. Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, who worked on the Academy Award-nominated film Blood Diamond together, will executive produce and adapt the novel. Zwick will be directing the six to 10 episode limited series package.

The crime novel, Billy Summers, follows a hit-man – currently going by the moniker Billy Summers – who is trying to complete a final high-profile assassination – his specialty – that will have a large enough payday for him to enter into retirement and to finally get out of the nasty business of killing people. The job requires him to move to a small little town, where he pretends to be an aspiring writer (because every King story has to have a reference to the legend). But Summers, a meticulous craftsman, at least when it comes to the business of killing, runs into some unexpected challenges along the way.

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Instead of following his flawless, pre-meditated plan, which he planned so that he wouldn’t get caught after he shoots the baddie, he decides to be a gentleman. One night outside Summers’ apartment, which he rented to dress up as Stephen King for months while he’s plotted the assassination of an awful dude (no spoilers) from his typewriter (very Misery, but reverse), he gets side-tracked when he decides to help a young woman who is dumped from a van after being sexually assaulted. In typical King flare, in the end, the young girl saves Billy and ensures his story lives on in the written word, not the other way around. It’s all very meta.

Billy Summers Takes Place During 2019

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Billy Summers also takes place around the COVID-19 pandemic, adding to the meta elements of the narrative. Debuting at number one on The New York Times fiction bestseller list, King first mentioned Billy Summers in an interview with NPR in April 2020, where he discussed having to change the plot of the novel several times due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic because the story took place in 2020. He told the interviewer:

I set [the book I’m working on] in the year 2020 because I thought, “OK, when I publish it, if it’s in 2021, it will be like in the past, safely in the past.” And then this thing came along, and I immediately looked back through the copy that I’d written, and I saw that one of the things that was going on was that two of my characters had gone on a cruise. … And I thought, “Well, no, I don’t think anybody’s going on cruise ships this year.” And so I looked at everything and I immediately set the book in 2019, where people could congregate and be together, and the story would work because of that.

Billy Summers will be Bad Robot’s latest series adaptation with King. The production company also adapted Lisey’s Story, Castle Rock, and 11.22.63.

About The Author

Rebecca Kaplan
(38 Articles Published)

Rebecca Kaplan (she/he) has a JD and an MS but believes comics do more good than law. His work can be found at Prism Comics, MovieWeb, Geek Girl Authority, PanelxPanel, StarTrek.com and Comics Bookcase, and in Double Challenge: Being LGBTQ and a Minority, which she co-authored with his wife, Avery Kaplan.

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