“Orphan Black” is coming back in the most unexpected of ways: as an audio sequel series. And yes, Tatiana Maslany is involved.
Temple Street Productions, the production company behind the now-ended BBC America drama, is partnering with digital fiction startup Serial Box for an audio continuation of the TV show, “Orphan Black: The Next Chapter.”
The 10-episode series is set eight years after the events of the show’s fifth and final season and will be released by Serial Box later this summer in audiobook and text formats. The official continuation of “Orphan Black” will feature the same characters from the series, with all 14 members of the original show’s clone sisterhood voiced by Maslany.
Temple Street and Serial Box (which is invested in by Temple Street’s parent company, Boat Rocker Studios) haven’t made additional plot details public yet, except to say “#cophine” — a reference to the couple Cosima (Maslany) and Delphine (Évelyne Brochu) — “definitely plays a big part in the story.”
Malka Older has been set as showrunner on “The Next Chapter,” with Mishell Baker, Lindsay Smith, Heli Kennedy, Madeline Ashby and E.C. Myers enlisted as writers.
Co-created by John Fawcett and Graeme Manson, “Orphan Black” launched in 2013 and ran for five seasons. The critically-acclaimed series starred Maslany as a woman who discovers that she is a clone and that someone is plotting to kill her and her clone “sisters.”
Maslany was nominated for three Emmys — winning best actress in a drama series in 2016 — and a Golden Globe for her performance on “Orphan Black.”
As TheWrap reported in March, a new “Orphan Black” series set in the show’s universe is currently in the works at AMC. An individual with knowledge of the project told TheWrap that the show is in the very, very early stages of development at BBC America’s sister network, with Temple Street attached to produce the new show.
The individual added that the follow-up series would not be considered a spinoff of the original but rather an entirely new show set in the same world as “Orphan Black.”