Showtime Announces New Limited Series PURITY, Starring Daniel Craig

A few months ago, we learned that Daniel Craig had joined a new 20-episode limited series called Purity, but we didn't have many more details than that. Now we just received a press release from Showtime officially announcing the show and providing some more information about it.

The show is based on the novel of the same name by author Jonathan Franzen (who will serve as a writer on the series), and it will be written and executive produced by Todd Field (Little Children, In The Bedroom), who will direct all 20 episodes to air over the course of two years. Here's the synopsis:

PURITY is a morally complex story of youthful idealism, extreme loyalty and cold-blooded murder. Jonathan Franzen’s intricately plotted novel is populated by characters both hungry for the truth and desperate to hide it. From STASI offspring to Oakland anarchists, Franzen tracks his characters' landscapes as varied as East Berlin, the Bolivian jungle, East Harlem walk-ups, and the California Redwoods. PURITY is at once supremely ambitious in scope and intensely intimate in its treatment of character – a decades-spanning tragicomedy that builds to a contemporary climax.

“Jonathan Franzen's Purity is an epic American novel that pulses with the energy of a psychological thriller. I whipped through it in a week,” said [Showtime President David] Nevins. “His gripping and timely story has attracted a powerhouse team – Todd Field, Scott Rudin, Eli Bush, David Hare, along with Franzen himself, and the brilliant Daniel Craig who is perfectly cast as the charismatic, mysterious ‘Andreas Wolf.’ Put it all together and PURITY promises to be the kind of taut, long-form, serialized storytelling that is the best of premium television, and is precisely what we at SHOWTIME aspire to deliver.”

Since production starts next year, this sounds like more mounting evidence that Craig may not return as James Bond in another movie, since the producers are openly meeting with other candidates. There's still a chance that it could all be a bluff on the part of the producers in order to make a better deal with Craig for one more outing, but we'll see how it all shakes out soon.