Sarah Snook Leads Alaska-Set 'Birds' Series
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- Sarah Snook is attached to star in a limited series reimagining of 'The Birds' written by Tom Spezialy, being taken out to buyers by Universal International Studios and Heyday Television (David Heyman's joint venture with UIS).
- The series relocates the story from Hitchcock's Bodega Bay to Alaska, where traveling magistrate Myra Massey (Snook) returns to her isolated hometown for a presumptive death hearing and instead finds a childhood friend's bullet-ridden body, with bird attacks erupting as she investigates.
- Heyday Television's Sue Gibbs said at SXSW London that the show is not adapting Hitchcock's film, but going back to Daphne du Maurier's 1952 novella, framing the central theme as 'when nature turns on you' in the context of climate change.
- The series swaps Hitchcock's damsel-in-distress protagonist Melanie Daniels for Myra Massey, 'who has to rely on herself because no one is coming to her rescue,' a deliberate inversion of the 1963 film's Tippi Hedren role.
- Previous attempts to revisit 'The Birds' never reached the screen, including a 2007 Universal feature with Naomi Watts attached and Martin Campbell directing, and a 2017 BBC series by Conor McPherson set in du Maurier's Cornwall.
- Spezialy reunites with UIS after executive producing 'Watchmen' (2020 Emmy for Outstanding Limited Series) and 'The Leftovers,' and is currently EPing the Prime Video series 'Blade Runner 2099'; Snook returns to UIS after starring in Peacock's 'All Her Fault.'
Why it matters: The package gives Snook a high-profile prestige follow-up to 'All Her Fault' while letting UIS and Heyday — whose 'Apples Never Fall' was a 2024 Peacock hit — pitch a genre property that explicitly distances itself from the Hitchcock film by going back to du Maurier's source and resetting the lead as a self-reliant woman. For buyers, the Alaska murder-mystery hook and climate-change framing offer a way to reenter a 63-year-old horror brand without remaking a sacrosanct classic.
