MediaCorp, Singapore’s public broadcast group, is moving ahead with the first project to emerge from its partnership with online story vault Wattpad. The news was announced on the first day of the Asia Television Forum in Singapore.
The pair will adapt hit romantic story “Slow Dancing” by Singaporean writer Noelle as a six part series. The show will appear under the “Lights, Camera” label on Mediacorp’s meWATCH digital entertainment service, as well as made available on Mediacorp Channel 5 every Tuesday at 9.30pm. Production is slated to start in March 2020 with Mediacorp Studios.
“Slow Dancing” has been a blockbuster on Wattpad, boasting more than 9.5 million reads to date and nearly 400,000 votes from fans. Author Noelle has amassed more than 243,000 followers and 45.7 million reads from 17 stories posted to the Wattpad site. Wattpad’s Aron Levitz and Eric Lehrman will produce, along with supervising executive producer Tan Wei-Lyn . Lillian Wang is set as the lead writer.
A deal between the two companies was first announced in April this year. The pair said that projects will be sourced from Wattpad using the company’s machine learning technology. That allows them to select popular stories and also to generate ideas and angles that can be used during the screenwriting and development process.Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.