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Patrick Somerville is an American novelist, screenwriter, and television producer born April 14, 1979. He graduated from Cornell University in 2005 and has since established himself as a unique voice in both literature and television.
As a novelist, Somerville has published acclaimed works including "The Cradle" (2009), "This Bright River" (2012), and the short story collections "Trouble" (2006) and "The Universe in Miniature in Miniature" (2010).
In television, Somerville has created and showrun several critically acclaimed series including HBO Max's "Station Eleven," Netflix's "Maniac," and HBO Max's "Made for Love." He also served as a writer and producer on HBO's "The Leftovers."
In 2022, Somerville launched Tractor Beam, a feature film and television production company with David Eisenberg, with the mission of making content that centers on creatives and empowers them to control the filmmaking process.
"Our mission at Tractor Beam is to help creators get home. Streamers have opened up astounding new opportunities in television and film, for many different voices, but in a time of unprecedented expansion, we wanted to create a company centered around protecting the process, trust, and doing it right."
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I bow to the impossible chances of being born, but I bow more to the more impossible chances of being born, growing up in this century, and liking your job.
A charming little fable about a man dispatched by his pregnant wife to retrieve her stolen childhood cradle before their baby's birth. Weighing in at less than 200 pages, The Cradle was one of 2009's great finds, its brevity turning its potentially sappy premise into something almost mythical.
Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by Janet Maslin of the New York Times.
A novel of crisis and survival, greed and guilt, love and delusion. Ben Hanson is 32 and fresh out of jail. He has moved back into his Uncle Denny's house following the man's death. While living back in his hometown, he discovers an old classmate, Lauren Sheehan, still lives there. Lauren comes with baggage of her own, and together they forge a tenuous relationship.
Somerville's debut collection of short stories that established his voice as a writer.
In this genre-busting book, characters, stories, and stray thoughts revolve around the "The Machine of Understanding Other People," the story of a Chicago man who is bequeathed a supernatural helmet that allows him to experience the inner worlds of those around him.
Mind-bending and cracklingly new, Somerville's broadly appealing and uniquely imaginative constructions probe the outer reaches of sympathy, death, and love in a world seen from the inside out.
A post-apocalyptic saga spanning multiple timelines, telling the stories of survivors of a devastating flu as they attempt to rebuild and reimagine the world anew while holding on to the best of what's been lost.
Based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel.
A dark comedy following Hazel Green, a woman on the run after 10 years in a suffocating marriage to a tech billionaire who has implanted a monitoring device in her brain.
Two strangers are drawn to a mysterious pharmaceutical trial that will, they're assured, with no complications or side-effects whatsoever, solve all of their problems, permanently. Things do not go as planned.
Starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill.
Three years after the disappearance of 2% of the global population, a group of people in a small New York community try to continue their lives while coping with the tragedy of the unexplained nature of the event.
Series adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel's novel about crisis and survival, greed and guilt, love and delusion.
Series adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel's novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later.
A sci-fi thriller set on an earth-like planet, where a mother (Jessica Biel) and daughter (Xochitl Gomez) fight for survival while hiding from a group of relentless hunters.
Patrick Somerville writes about TV, screenwriting, jetpacks, movies, and being destroyed by one's own children, but slow.
"As a person who went from audience normie (someone who had never been on a set) to a showrunner, in his late-thirties, I notice certain things about production that I sometimes think are rote, to the people who've done it all their lives. 'Production' is a state of being, in and of itself, and not necessarily happening where the cameras are; when you're in the center of it, or, as Arthur Leander says in Episode 8 of Station Eleven, you are 'in the shit' — it becomes the only thing that's real. The rest of the world is an idea someone maybe pitched, one time, but it never got made."
Read on Substack"I bow to the impossible chances of being born, but I bow more to the more impossible chances of being born, growing up in this century, and liking your job. The television industry isn't exactly collapsing, but of course that's what I'd say; I don't want it to, but no one's in control. The wreckage of derelict space-stations falling onto farms in Kansas, and every state, is maybe a better description of how it feels, in Hollywood, coming into the fall of 2024."
Read on SubstackReflections on the 2023 WGA strike and its impact on the television industry and creative process.
Read on SubstackFor professional inquiries:
Tractor Beam Productions
Los Angeles, CA