'The Human Conditions' Will Team Up Damon Lindelof And Matt Reeves For HBO Max "Magical-Realist Medical Drama"

Two of the most exciting names in Hollywood storytelling are coming together for an HBO Max series.

Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers, Watchmen) is teaming up with Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, War for the Planet of the Apes, the upcoming The Batman) to produce an HBO Max show called The Human Conditions, a "magical-realist medical drama" that hails from British writer/director Oscar Sharp. Get the details below.The Hollywood Reporter has the news about The Human Conditions which centers on "a young British doctor [who] must learn to treat impossible, fantastical illnesses by healing the emotional issues that underlie them — and confronting her own along the way."

Oscar Sharp earned some attention with his Olivia Colman-starring short film The Kármán Line in 2014, and two years later, he teamed up with a technologist named Ross Goodwin to make a short film called Sunspring (watch it above). They made Sunspring in just 48 hours, but the most notable thing about the production was that it was "written" by an artificial intelligence program nicknamed Benjamin. Goodwin fed the program hundreds of science fiction screenplays and essentially taught it to write its own story, and Sharp cast a group of actors to act out the resulting screenplay.

Sharp has six other short films listed on IMDb, but he has never directed a feature film or a television series before. THR says he will be a writer and director on The Human Conditions, and he will also serve as an executive producer alongside Lindelof, Reeves, Daniel Pipski (A Teacher), Rafi Crohn (Tales from the Loop), Tanya Seghatchian (The Crown), and John Woodward (Cold War).

I don't immediately think of HBO Max as a home for medical dramas, but a magical-realist medical drama that's actually a stealthy piece of character exploration for the doctor at the center of the story? That sounds like the kind of big creative swing that HBO Max would take in order to try to stand out a little in the ongoing streaming wars.

The fact that veterans like Reeves and Lindelof are on board to help guide this show should allay any fears anyone has about Sharp's lack of experience. Neither of those guys attaches their name to anything lightly, which stands in direct contrast to someone like Steven Spielberg, who has executive produced a number of shows in the last twenty years that left such a minimal cultural footprint that they may as well have never existed. Now the question becomes: who plays the young British doctor at the center of this story?