KOOL-AID MAN

Bill Hader’s Next Super Dark HBO Series Revealed

The Emmy winner’s new project might sound eerily familiar to fans of Seth Rogen’s “The Studio.”

Bill Hader is diving into even darker territory for his next HBO project. According to Variety, the Emmy winner is teaming up with Daniel Zelman to develop a series focused on Jim Jones and the tragic events surrounding the Peoples Temple and Jonestown. Hader and Zelman will co-write the series and act as co-showrunners and executive producers. Hader is also in talks to direct and possibly star in the show as Jones himself. The story centers on the rise of Jim Jones, who founded the Peoples Temple in the 1950s. In the 1970s, he established a remote settlement in Guyana called Jonestown. The world was shocked in 1978 when Jones orchestrated the death of 900 people who “drank the Kool-Aid” in a mass murder-suicide. Hader previously created and starred in Barry for HBO, the dark comedy that concluded in 2023 after four acclaimed seasons. The series earned Hader 16 Emmy nominations and two wins for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. The idea of a Hollywood adaptation of the Jonestown massacre was recently a major plot point on Seth Rogen’s Apple TV+ series The Studio, which imagined director Martin Scorsese using the Kool-Aid intellectual property to tell a story about Jim Jones starring Steve Buscemi.