(What would have been the four-hour version, running just over three hours without commercials, eventually aired on BBC and is now the easiest cut to find.) The network returned to Huxley’s World State again in 1998, with a TV movie starring Peter Gallagher and Leonard Nimoy. A version of it, anyway-the miniseries had shrunk from six, to four, then finally three hours and been reduced to a TV movie. NBC found out that adapting Brave New World was tricky indeed-and not for the last time.Īfter pulling Brave New World from its schedule several times, NBC finally aired it in March 1980. And perhaps inspired by the Star Wars–stoked interest in all things science fiction, she also commissioned an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian landmark Brave New World-despite it being, as a profile of Barkley described at the time, “a tricky property everyone in Hollywood had been afraid of.” Starring 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Keir Dullea and Harold and Maude’s Bud Cort, it was set to debut in 1979 and run for six hours across several nights.

By 1978, she’d locked down the rights to James Michener’s Centennial, recruited Natalie Wood for a six-part adaptation of From Here to Eternity, and picked up James Clavell’s Shogun for a lavish production destined to become a ratings sensation in 1980. In the back half of the 1970s, when miniseries adaptations like Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots became runaway hits, a great book could make or break a TV career-so the influential NBC producer Deanne Barkley scooped up as many great books as she could.

A brave new world plot