The Nine Inch Nails frontman is bringing his apocalyptic 2007 sci-fi concept album to the small screen as an HBO miniseries. Warning: It won't be feel-good TV.

More than two years ago, Trent Reznor dropped the news that he was in early talks with HBO to adapt Year Zero—which had already been turned into an alternate reality game—and now it seems like things are moving along at a pretty decent pace. BBC Worldwide Productions has come aboard as the studio, and Carnivale's Daniel Knauf is writing the pilot.

"It's exciting," Reznor told the L.A. Times' Geoff Boucher. "I probably shouldn't say too much about it except that I understand that there's a thousand hurdles before anything shows up in your TV listing. It's been an interesting and very educational process, and it cleared the HBO hurdle a few months ago, and now we're writing drafts back and forth. So it's very much alive and incubating at the moment."

As for what Year Zero is about, it was born out of Reznor's frustration with what America and, by extension, the world became during the Bush years. And, rather than write a traditional protest record, he decided to spin the story forward. "I started by writing a kind of world bible about what life would be like around 15 or 20 years from now if things continue on the same path. I spent a few weeks filling it in with the events that could lead to this kind of time and place. Then as an experiment I started writing songs about people in this place and from different points of view."

Who knows when you'll see Year Zero? As Reznor freely admits, "I've learned that [television development] moves at a glacial pace." But be prepared for a downer of monumental proportions whenever it arrives.

(via Hero Complex)