Astronauts Wanted, Bernie Su’s Canvas Team Up For Crime Thriller

A pair of digital studios are teaming up for a new web series. Astronauts Wanted, the production company founded by former MTV exec Judy McGrath, will team up with Bernie Su and David Tochterman’s Canvas Media Studios for Socio, an upcoming crime thriller.

Socio will star actress India Eisley as a social media-obsessed teenager who teams up with a detective to hunt down a serial killer. Su described Eisley’s character to The Hollywood Reporter as “a teenage sociopath who operates on social media,” so viewers should expect a darker tone, especially when compared to previous Su projects like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Emma Approved.

Both Astronauts Wanted and Canvas are known for productions that use social media as a storytelling device, so their collaborative effort will naturally feature a large number of transmedia integrations. Viewers will be able to follow the main characters on Twitter and interact with them across social sites, and as Astronauts Wanted chief creative strategist Nick Shore

told The Hollywood Reporter, those interactions have been “baked into the entire development process” for Socio.

What we don’t know yet about Socio is the platform on which it will be distributed. Its pilot has already been shot, and the two companies involved in its production are looking to work with a premium distributor who can handle both the TV-level quality of the production and the digital nature of its social media interactions. The partner Astronauts Wanted and Canvas ultimately choose–and, beyond that, Socio’s release date–will be available later on.