HBO orders Nesbo novel adaptation

HBO is developing an hour-long drama based on Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbø’s crime story and feature film Headhunters.

Writer and executive producer Alexander Woo (True Blood) will adapt the 2008 novel for US premium cable channel. TBI first learned Zodiak Media-owned Scandi prodco Yellow Bird Entertainment was looking to take the property to television in April 2012.

Yellow Bird and Lionsgate Television are attached to produced alongside Woo and Game of Thrones’s Carolyn Strauss. Yellow Bird’s Berna Levin and Marianne Gray also exec produce.

Headhunters will closely follow Nesbø’s novel, which is a dark thriller about a corporate headhunter who becomes the target of an unknown individual.

Yellow Bird acquired rights soon after publication and released a successful movie adaptation in 2011. The company is also working with Nesbø on Occupied, a thriller about an imagined Russian invasion of Norway that NRK, Arte and another Zodiak producer, GTV, are all attached to.

Yellow Bird, best known for the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo adaptations and detective series Wallander, is working with Chernin Entertainment to develop another Scandi crime novel, The Swede, for ABC in the US.

The firm is repped in the US by UTA, while Nesbø is repped by Niclas Salomonsson.