Trent Reznor Developing 'Year Zero' Mini-Series for HBO

Three years after Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor first said he wanted to translate his apocalyptic concept album Year Zero into a mini-series, there's finally some movement — albeit at a "glacial pace" — to bring the concept to TV. "We are in [the development phase of] pre-production with HBO and BBC to do a miniseries," Reznor told the Los Angeles Times's Hero Complex blog. "It's exciting. I probably shouldn't say too much about it except that I understand that there's a thousand hurdles before anything shows up in your TV listing. It's been an interesting and very educational process and it cleared the HBO hurdle a few months ago and now we're writing drafts back and forth. So it's very much alive and incubating at the moment."

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Carnivale writer Daniel Knauf is "revising the over world Bible" of Year Zero, a dystopian tale of the United States becoming "born again" in the year 2022. (An exhaustive breakdown of the album's story and the "alternate reality game" that promoted it can be found at NINwiki.) Lawrence Bender, who has worked on all but one of Quentin Tarantino's films, and Kevin Kelly Brown are working as Year Zero's producer.

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Song Stories

“Time to Pretend”

MGMT | 2008

Listening to MGMT’s breakthrough song, one might interpret it as being about the excesses of rock stardom, but it’s actually about the duo’s pet praying mantis. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden told Rolling Stone they got the idea from the insect's jerky movements. The mantis died, but the two bandmates kept the egg sack and allowed the hundreds of eggs to hatch. “We tried to name them all, but they died after a day,” said Goldwasser, with VanWyngarden chiming in, “But the praying mantis dance inspired us.”

More Song Stories entries »

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