Filipino American author Lysley Tenorio’s award-winning debut novel “The Son of Good Fortune” will soon be adapted into a comedy series at Amazon.
Released last year, Tenorio’s coming-of-age debut novel won the Institute for Immigration Research’s 2020 New American Voices Award and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize this year.
Born in the Philippines, Lysley Tenorio lives in San Francisco and is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Stegner fellowship, the Edmund White Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Bogliasco Foundation.
Tenorio’s stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, and have been adapted for the stage by The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the Ma-Yi Theater in New York City.
Andrew Lopez will adapt the book for the screen and serve as an executive producer while Tenorio will serve as consulting producer, with Amazon Studios producing.
Tenorio shared his hopes that the adaptation of his novel will boost Filipino representation on the screen.
“As a TV-addicted kid, I’d daydream myself into my favorite shows, but struggled to figure out how a Filipino could fit into those stories; I grew up thinking I’d never see an American TV show about Filipinos in my lifetime,” Lysley Tenorio shared on Instagram on December 2, 2021.
“So it’s deeply meaningful to know it might actually happen, and that other Filipinos might see some part of themselves, however great or small, on the screen too,” Tenorio added.
“The Son of Good Fortune” follows an undocumented Filipino teenager named Excel who navigates a tumultuous relationship with his former B-movie action star mother, Maxima.
Excel then embarks on a journey to join his girlfriend, Sab, to a ramshackle desert town called Hello City to decide who he wants to become.
According to a Variety report, actor Riz Ahmed’s Left Handed Films and Lulu Wang’s Local Time are teaming up to develop the series based on Tenorio’s novel.
Cast members and the show’s release date and other details have yet to be released.
Shows and films that tell the stories of the Filipino diaspora include “Josep”, a new sitcom starring Hollywood comedian Jo Koy and “Yellow Rose”, the musical drama film starring Broadway stars Lea Salonga and Eva Noblezada, and Filipino actress Princess Punzalan.
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