Of all the major streaming services, the one I feel that’s too often unfairly overlooked is NBC’s Peacock. In the second quarter of this year, for example, the service had something on the order of 33 million paid subscribers — obviously, a drop in the bucket compared to Netflix’s more than 277 million. Me, I couldn’t care less about a data point like that; if something’s good, I’ll watch it. It doesn’t matter which streamer it’s on, or how many subscribers that streamer has.
And, increasingly, when I have free time I find myself opening up the Peacock app these days. I like that it’s got a hybrid live TV option to complement its originals like Poker Face and Ted. I also especially like that Peacock isn’t playing small ball, but rather still reaching for interesting projects with quality talent attached to them, like the two upcoming Peacock series I’m going to talk about below.
Given that both were straight-to-series orders, neither has a release timeframe just yet. However, they both offer an exciting look at some of Peacock’s upcoming projects.
Ponies
This first upcoming Peacock title is an espionage thriller that boasts some serious talent both in front of and behind the camera.
As someone who loves a quality spy drama, the description alone of Ponies got me excited: It’s set in Moscow during the Cold War, and Emilia Clarke plays Bea — an educated, Russian-speaking child of Soviet immigrants. She’s a PONY (in intelligence-speak, a “person of no interest”) who works anonymously as a secretary in the American embassy. She and a colleague, a small-town girl named Twila, all of a sudden become widows when their husbands are killed under mysterious circumstances in the USSR.
Bea and Twilia become CIA operatives who work to uncover a vast conspiracy behind their husbands’ deaths.
On the creative side, Peacock’s Ponies comes from Emmy Award-nominated director Susanna Fogel (The Flight Attendant, The Spy Who Dumped Me), who’s co-writing here alongside Mr. Robot’s David Iseron — with Iserson also serving as the Ponies showrunner.
M.I.A.
Another of Peacock’s new straight-to-series orders is for M.I.A., a female-led crime thriller set in South Florida that — get this — comes from the co-creator of Netflix’s Ozark (note to Peacock: I’m sold already!!). And the top-tier talent doesn’t stop there; Stefano Sollima — who created and directed Prime Video’s epic crime drama ZeroZeroZero, as well as showrunning and directing the iconic Italian mafia drama Gomorrah — is directing M.I.A.
The new show’s logline: “Running drugs is a family affair for Etta Tiger Jonze, but when her family is slaughtered before her eyes, Etta sets out to exact justice on those responsible — avenging her blood family while she builds her chosen family, igniting her series journey from powerless orphan to South Florida’s most powerful criminal Queenpin.”
Coupled with other recent standouts, including The Killer and the upcoming The Day of the Jackal, consider this a reminder that, notwithstanding its size relative to the other major streamers, Peacock is out there still doing its thing, and still playing to win.
