A Land Remembered -- Florida's Cult Classic Gets Its TV Adaptation
- Vero Minute
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Florida's history has never had its Yellowstone moment. The crackers, the cattle drives, the scrub, the lagoon and the slow gorgeous ruin of it all. This might be it!
A Land Remembered has been Florida's cult novel for forty years. Published in 1984, Patrick D. Smith's book follows three generations of the MacIveys, Georgia migrants who arrive in the Florida scrub in 1858 with nothing and, by 1968, have helped pave over the wild place they once loved. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It's been required reading in Florida schools for decades. People press it on newcomers like a local ordinance.
The story cuts close here in Vero and Indian River County. Before the condos, before the causeways, before the subdivisions pushing west into the palmetto scrub, this stretch of coast was something else entirely. Florida crackers drove wild cattle through hammocks so dense the sun barely reached the ground. They learned from the Seminoles. They survived hurricanes, freezes, Confederate deserters, and swarms of mosquitoes thick enough to darken the sky.
The MacIveys are fictional, but the families they represent were real, and many of their descendants still live here.
Smith's genius was seeing that the same grit that built Florida also consumed it. Each generation of MacIveys gains a little more and loses a little more of what they came for.
Filming is underway on a $25 million, four-episode first season directed by Tampa-based Todd Wiseman Jr., with Philip Ettinger, Lily McInerny, and William Catlett heading the cast. Six hundred head of livestock. Civil War battle scenes. Shot entirely in Florida. Wiseman turned down Georgia's 40% tax incentive rather than film it anywhere else. The production goes to MIPCOM and TIFF this fall, with more seasons in the works.
