EXCLUSIVE: Prime Video is adapting New York Times bestseller and BookTok hit ‘Boys of Tommen’ with the producers of Twilight, The Summer I Turned Pretty and One Day bringing the stories to the screen. The Prime Video series will span the first two of Irish author Chloe Walsh’s six-book series, with Poppy Cogan (A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder) penning the scripts.
It’s the second major greenlight from Prime Video’s international content chief Nicole Clemens. For her first interview in the role, the former Paramount TV Studio boss sat down with Deadline and shared her priorities and goals.
‘Boys of Tommen’ is a sweeping romance told across six books. The streaming series wil take in the first and second novels in the series, Binding 13 and Keeping 13. Drama Republic, Temple Hill, and wiip are sharing production duties on the eight episode series alongside Amazon MGM Studios. Production is slated to start this year, meaning the show could hit Prime Video in 2027.
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The show will follow the forbidden love story of Johnny Kavanagh, the star rugby player on the verge of a pro career, and Shannon Lynch, the talented but painfully shy new girl at the prestigious Tommen College in Ballylaggin, Ireland. Both teens are hiding secrets; Johnny, a potentially devastating injury and Shannon, a troubled and violent homelife.
Walsh topped the New York Times bestseller list with her books, which were also huge on BookTok, another key barometer of a modern-day hit story. She said: “The response from readers around the world has been overwhelming, and knowing that everyone behind this production and book shares my passion for telling this story authentically means the world to me.”
For Clemens, the show is a major play and comes on the heels of Manchester-set cop story Dirty, from Bridge of Spies scribe Matt Charman, meaning her first commissions are a combination of one big adaptation of popular IP and one original story.
Clemens signed on as VP of International Originals at Prime Video last summer, swapping L.A. for London in the process. Having settled into life in the English capital, she said her immediate priorities are two-fold, building a UK and Ireland slate and zeroing in on the other shows made outside the U.S. that have big international potential.
“There are two main focuses,” the former producer, agent and Paramount exec said. “I really wanted to come into the UK, and because of my longstanding relationships with talent and producers here, help build that slate. And I have a fantastic team in Gemma Brandler and Punit Mattoo and our team underneath them, but this is where I’m really hands on, and I’m in pitches, in the creative readings, everything.”
Speaking about her other immediate goal a little over six months into the job, Clemens said: “There’s probably a good handful, somewhere between 20 and 25 shows a year on average, that can travel. We call those ‘out of home country’ shows. It’s great when they go global, but that could also mean a show in Spain that travels all over Latin America. So those shows are the shows that I’m doing a deeper dive into in order to really help the teams connect the dots…to identify and amplify them.”
When there’s a new buyer in town, it’s natural that local producers will want to know what they’re after. That is certainly the case with Clemens and the UK’s drama community. “What I’ve been communicating to producers and to talent is that we’re making stories and shows for the UK. We’d love the show to travel, but they are not being reverse engineered, they are largely British producers, British writers, IP and talent.”
She added: “I don’t know everybody here, but I know a lot of people, and a lot of people know me having come here as an agent, having come here as FX, and as Paramount. I would say that my taste aligns with what I think a great Amazon show is, which is, ‘it can be populist literature’, something that is entertaining, propulsive and fun, but it is ultimately about something.”
“Low bureaucracy”
The other message for producers is Prime Video wants to be crystal clear about what it wants and the process of greenlighting. “It’s important to be able to say the decisions are being made here and there’s very low bureaucracy. What has maybe been perceived as a little bit of an opaque process, we’re wanting to make it as transparent as possible, so that people know what we want, what we’re looking for, and that we are moving quickly, and that we want to build the slate.”
Bringing it back to ‘Boys of Tommen’, the Prime Video exec said: “It’s just an unbelievable constellation of characters, but it’s also got such a specificity for place and the time. It talks about abuse, about bullying, about mental health, and it’s about love. It’s a romance series.”
With six primary books in all, is this a franchise in the making? “Who knows how many we do, but hopefully it goes for a long time,” Clemens said. “There’s plenty of material and plenty of incredible, rich characters.”
Cogan is lead writer on ‘Boys of Tommen’ and also an exec producer alongside author of the series, Walsh, wiip’s Paul Lee, Hope Hartman and Sean Flanagan, Temple Hill’s Wyck Godfrey, Marty Bowen, James Seidman and Annika Patten and Drama Republic’s Greg Brenman and Deena Butt.