Former president and first lady, Barack and Michelle Obama, said their new film production company, Higher Grounds Production, would cover a wide range of programming when they signed a deal with Netflix last year. They were not lying.
Higher Grounds announced its first slate of seven shows on Tuesday, which vary from the likely-moving drama series Bloom, which traces the lives of women and people of color in post-World War II New York, to an adaptation of a Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Frederick Douglas, to a children's show entitled Listen to Your Parents and Eat Your Vegetables, which explores the global history of food.
The slate also includes two documentaries — one about an Ohio town where a Chinese billionaire opened a factory in a former General Motors plant and hired 2,000 workers, and another about the origins of the disability rights movement. Finally, Higher Grounds will adapt two works of journalism. Michael Lewis' book The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy will be turned into a nonfiction series, while The New York Times' "Overlooked" series, which provides obituaries for people who did not receive them at the time of their deaths, will become a scripted anthology.
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Although the shows appear to vary widely, they do all fall under similar broad themes. In a statement, Michelle Obama said the shows will "touch on race and class, democracy and civil rights."
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