HBO’s Doing an Historical Comedy About Paleontologists. Called Bone Wars. This Is a Good Day.

A Steve Carell– and James Gandolfini-starring made-for-TV comedy isn’t our normal sort of thing at The Mary Sue. But if it’s about “feuding paleontologists”? Based on a real-life event called the “Great Dinosaur Rush”? And called Bone Wars? You bet your sweet bippy we’re covering it.

Writes Deadline:

The project, now in development, is based on the real-life Bone Wars (aka the Great Dinosaur Rush) between Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and Othniel Charles Marsh of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. Set during the post-Civil War birth of American science, the film is a sophisticated comedy about one of history’s most notorious feuds — the great dinosaur fossil race between paleontologists Marsh (Gandolfini) and Cope (Carell) — a decades-long competition that led to the discovery of more than 160 dinosaurs and their mutual downward spiral.

Bless you, HBO. Bless you. Gandolfini and Carell are both executive producers on the movie, so I’m guessing there’s something about the Great Dinosaur Rush that appeals to them on a personal level. As it should be.

There’s no writer yet, and no word on whether this beautiful piece of cinematic brilliance (I’m calling it now) will air. It can’t come soon enough. Postbellum America. Dinosaurs. Science history. Feuds. I’m having an emotional reaction. It’s too wonderful, I can’t handle it.

(via: Deadline)

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?