Guillermo del Toro Lands Hitchcockian Drama Series ‘Nutshell Studies’ at HBO

Guillermo del Toro’s been spending more time producing than directing these days. It will have been five years since “Hellboy II” hit theaters by the time his aliens versus robots film “Pacific Rim” premieres in summer 2013. But he’s hardly been taking things easy, having had his hand in producing everything from “Puss in Boots” to “Julia’s Eyes” to the upcoming horror flick “Mama” in the meantime — and of course there’s the little matter of his screenplays for Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” trilogy.

Del Toro’s also been dabbling in TV, developing a new live-action “The Incredible Hulk” series at ABC, and now he’s got a show in the works at HBO. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the premium cable channel has picked up the rights for “Nutshell Studies,” a Hitchcockian drama created by photographer Corinne May Botz and is centered around a 1950s housewife who becomes obsessed with solving brutal crimes.

It’s a scenario that sounds like it’s right up Del Toro’s genre-bending alley — he’ll serve as both executive producer and director on the project, while “Southland” writer and novelist Sara Gran will write and co-executive produce.

“The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” is a photography book Botz published in 2004. It looks at a series of miniature crime scene models based on actual homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths that were created in the ’40s and ’50s by criminologist Frances Glessner Lee as a training tool for detectives. You can look through some of the images, which are fantastically creepy, at Botz’s website.