The Jackal Group Options Ricardo Nuila’s ‘The Poor Unfortunates’ Book For Television

by Denise Petski via Deadline on 8/23/18

Gail Berman’s The Jackal Group has optioned the rights to Ricardo Nuila’s upcoming book The Poor Unfortunates to develop for television. The book will be published by Scribner in 2019. The project is described as a medical procedural inspired by the patients and doctors at Ben Taub Hospital, Houston’s largest safety net hospital, where Nuila works as an attending physician and teacher of internal medicine.

The potential series examines how Nuila’s colleagues and medical students handle an incredible range of patients, including the state’s poor and undocumented. The Poor Unfortunates is described as a compelling first-hand account of Ben Taub patients, and shows how looming bureaucratic structures and governmental regulations conflict with – but do not break – the moral duty of doctoring.

The Jackal Group’s Berman and Joe Earley will executive produce. Nuila will serve as co-executive producer.

Nuila’s articles have appeared on The New Yorker and The Atlantic websites, and in The New York Times Sunday Review, as well as the Virginia Quarterly Review, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Texas Monthly. He recently received the prestigious Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Graduate School at the University.

The property is repped by ICM Partners.