Debut docu-show for Amazon

Amazon Prime Instant Video’s latest pilot season includes the SVOD service’s first docu-series pilot.

The New Yorker Presents… will be a half-hour show billed as a “completely unique viewing experience”.

It will feature a short film starring Alan Cumming (The Good Wife) and Brett Gelman (Go On) based on a story from Saturday Night Live’s Simon Rich, a Jonathan Demme documentary about biologist Tyrone Hayes, and an interview with performance artist Marina Abramovic.

Taxi to the Dark Side filmmaker Alex Gibney is executive producer, alongside Dave Snyder (Death Row Stories) and Dawn Ostroff (The Fashion Fund). Condé Nast Entertainment and Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions coproduce.

Further pilots on Amazon’s slate include a remake of BSkyB dark comedy-drama Mad Dogs.

News of Amazon’s pilot first leaked earlier this year. FX has previously greenlit a limited series, though the cable channel’s involvement now appears over. (FX couldn’t be contacted before press time.)

Sony Pictures Television is coproducing the show with Left Bank Pictures, which comes from Cris Cole (The Bill), Shawn Ryan (The Shield), Marney Hochman, Left Banks’Andy Harries, Suzanne Mackie and Charles McDougall.

Cocked comes from Lie to Me’s Sam Baum and Manhattan creator Sam Shaw. It follows a family man and corporate lapdog who is forced to return to his small town home to help the family gun business.

Down Dog follows the story of a late-30s playboy, whose easy life is disrupted after splitting up with his older girlfriend, who is also the boss of the LA yoga studio he works at. Robin Schliff (Are You There Chelsea?) wrote the script.

The Man in the High Castle is based on Philip K. Dick’s Hugo Award-winning 1962 alternative history novel of the same name, which consider what the world would have happen in Japan and Germany had won the Second World War.

Frank Spotnitz wrote the pilot, and also executive produces with director David Semel, Christopher Tricarico, Stewart Mackinnon and Christian Baute of Headline Pictures, Scott Free Productions Ridley Scott and Jordan Sheenan, Electric Shepherd’s Isa Dick Hackett and Kalen Egan and David Zucker.

Half-hour comedy Salem Rogers is about an overly-confident, brash and hard-partying former supermodel returning to the real world after a decade in a posh rehab centre. Will Graham (The Onion News Network) executive produces.