March 2, 2013 | Arts / Entertainment

Powerful AIDS doc to become ABC mini-series

How to Survive a Plague, the Oscar-nominated 2012 documentary about the birth of ACT UP and the Treatment Action Group (TAG) and how they forced the US government and pharmaceutical companies to confront AIDS, is being turned into a television mini-series on ABC.

The scripted show will flesh out the story of both groups, adding characters and dramatizing events.

“We know we’d like [the miniseries] to be an extended story that’s not just about AIDS and what AIDS wrought, but about this tremendous civil-rights movement that grew from the ashes of AIDS, and the dawn of the LGBT movement,” explained David France, the documentary's director.

“People got a sense from the doc that many of the activists were soldiers drafted into a war that perhaps they were not ready to fight but that they had trained themselves for,” said producer Howard Gertler. “We really want to show a wide audience how that happened.”

France added: “ABC is the network of Roots - For [them], this is a continuation of a dialogue that they’ve had with their viewers and with history, and that to me was the most decisive and convincing fact in our discussion — this idea that we can do that again and that we can be that for the gay community.”

All we can say is: don't fuck it up ABC! This could be some pretty good television.

Oscar-Nominated Doc 'How to Survive a Plague' to Become ABC Miniseries [The Hollywood Reporter]