Showtime Orders 20-Episode 'Purity' Starring Daniel Craig, Directed By Todd Field

In case it wasn’t clear that Daniel Craig gives zero fucks about making time in his calendar to play James Bond again, the actor has decided to spend a good chunk of next year making a television event series.

Showtime has scooped up “Purity,” the 20-episode adaptation of Jonathan Franzen‘s novel, that will have every single entry directed by Todd Field, who will also co-write the scripts with the author and David Hare (“The Hours,” “The Reader“). It will mark the filmmaker’s first effort behind the camera since 2006’s great “Little Children,” and while the wait has been long, 20 hours of drama from Field is just fine by me. And frankly, he’s probably eager to get working too after seeing a small handful of movies —”Beautiful Ruins,” “As It Happens,” “The White Tiger,” “The Creed Of Violence,” “Battered Bastards Of Baseball” — fail to gain traction.

“Purity” will center around a young, idealist woman named Pip Tyler, who falls into a relationship with German activist, Andreas Wolf (to be played by Craig), with the tale taking the characters around the world, with plenty of sex and intrigue to spice things up. Here’s the book synopsis:

Young Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother–her only family–is hazardous. But she doesn’t have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she’ll ever have a normal life.

Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world–including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn’t understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.

Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters–Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers–and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes.

Production will begin on “Purity” in 2017, and the series will air across two years. As for Craig, this fall he’ll shoot Steven Soderbergh‘s “Logan Lucky,” and roll his eyes if you keep asking him about 007. [Deadline]