Moorestown native’s next TV project will be a female-focused ‘Dune’ series

South Jersey native Dana Calvo, best known as creator of Amazon’s Good Girls Revolt, has another female-focused project in the works — but this time it has more of a sci-fi twist.

Calvo, who hails from Moorestown, has been added as a co-showrunner for HBO Max’s Dune: The Sisterhood, according to a Deadline report. The upcoming series is based on writer Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, and is to work in conjunction with an upcoming feature film that is currently in production as part of a franchise plan that includes comic books, video games, and other digital elements.

Written by co-showrunner Jon Spaihts, Dune: The Sisterhood will show Herbert’s futuristic Dune universe from the perspective of a group of women known as the Bene Gesserit. According to Deadline, the Bene Gesserit have been “given extraordinary abilities by their mastery of the body and mind,” and have mysterious plans that bring them to the planet Dune.

“The Bene Gesserit have always been fascinating to me,” director Denis Villneuve, who will helm the series pilot as well as upcoming Dune feature, told Hollywood Reporter last month. “Focusing a series around that powerful order of women seemed not only relevant and inspiring but a dynamic setting for the television series.”

Calvo previously created and executive produced Good Girls Revolt, a season of which aired on Amazon before being axed by former president of media development Roy Price. Price was indefinitely suspended from the company in 2017 following allegations of sexual assault.

The show, which was based on Lynn Povich’s book The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changes the Workplace, dealt with sex discrimination in the world of journalism in 1969. Calvo herself worked as a journalist at the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times before working in television.

“I’m so grateful. It’s landed. It’s about women. It’s about something important,” Calvo told the Inquirer of the show in 2016. “And it’s still really entertaining. And then I get to showcase how fun it is to work in a newsroom.”

In addition to Good Girls Revolt, Calvo has written or produced for programs including Narcos, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and Franklin & Bash, among others.