A TV series based on George Washington's contradictions, including his slave ownership, is being shopped around

Deadline

Titled The President, the potential series -- created by Blue Bloods writers Brian Burns and William N. Collage with Antoine Fuqua on board as director and executive producer -- "has a pilot script and an eight-episode bible for a series that tells the complex story of America’s first elected leader and the contradictions behind the man who, after leading the country to victory in the Revolutionary War, made an indelible mark on setting up a democratic government as its first president," reports Deadline's Mike Fleming Jr. "In his first 153 days, Washington unified the warring factions of the country; organized the State, Treasury and what was then called the War Department; set up the Supreme Court; and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Constitution in 1791. There is hypocrisy: Washington and wife Martha owned 300 enslaved people who toiled on their Virginia plantation. He ripped nine of them away from their families to join him when he set up the government in New York, where slavery was not outlawed until 1807. The shape of the series is important history, but the stories of the enslaved are a big part of the narrative in a drama that plays out like The Crown and Downton Abbey. The contradictions loom heavily, as when Washington’s enslaved staff serves Founding Fathers like James Madison as they worked out the Bill of Rights, with none of the amendments extending to the servants." Burns came up with the idea for the series and brought it to Collage, who wrote Fuqua's upcoming Will Smith action thriller Emancipation, about a runaway slave.