Jeremy Strong making a show about those Boeing planes that wouldn’t stop crashing

On his HBO series Succession, Jeremy Strong spends his days exploring the intersection of incompetence, greed, and personal moral failings that combine to fuck up the planet in myriad destructive ways. Now, Strong has set a new side project for himself, apparently in between Succession seasons…in which he’ll apparently explore the intersection of incompetence, greed, and personal moral failings that combine to fuck up the planet in myriad destructive ways.

Fun!

Which is to say: Deadline reports that Strong has signed on to both star in and executive produce a new limited series about the Boeing 737 Max, the airliner that the plane manufacturer grounded in 2019, after it was publicly revealed that a fault in the plane’s stabilization system had caused two separate crashes, killing a total of 346 people. We get into the real Waystar Royco territory, though, with the revelation that people at Boeing allegedly tried to cover up the lethal faults in the “Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System,” and that the FAA was possibly very lax in its certification process for the craft. (Boeing ultimately paid out about $5 billion in fines, settlement costs, and money to survivors’ groups, but no one at the company was ever prosecuted for any wrongdoing. The aircraft were un-grounded in 2020 after the issue was apparently fixed.)

Which brings us back around to Strong and this new show; rather than taking on the part of another corporate failson, the actor will apparently play an engineer who’s described as a composite of several real-life people. The series (still untitled) is being written by Chris Terrio, whose Argo Oscar stands as testament to his ability to take a complicated real-world issue and translate it into a fascinating and lively fictional account.

This’ll be Strong’s first time stepping into the producer’s chair, as his Emmy-winning turn on Succession has massively elevated his profile in recent years. (Even if he and his friends haven’t always been entirely happy with the “profile” part of that increase in fame.) The series is being developed at Amazon Studios in association with Plan B. No word yet on how the show might affect Strong’s Succession schedule, if at all, but the long gaps between that show’s season—and the nature of a limited series, for as much as that term’s been devalued in recent years—suggest it probably won’t be too terribly disruptive.