Christina Ricci Will Star as Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and Other Gems from Amazon’s Fall Pilots Announcement

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Amazon just announced its lineup of fall pilots, which comprises everything from a flapper-era period piece to an outlandish family comedy to a gruesome Western to a topical political thriller. One of the most compelling descriptions is of a pilot that’ll see Christina Ricci playing the iconic author and dancer, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.

The pilot, titled Z, will follow Sayre through her initial courtship with F. Scott Fitzgerald and into their marriage, traveling with them from Montgomery, AL to the Côte d’Azure. A press release describes it as a dive “into the fascinating life of a woman ahead of her time, an artist determined to establish her own identity in the tempestuous wake of a world-famous husband.” (Gavin Stenhouse will play F. Scott Fitzgerald.) The show is penned by The Killing writers Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin — so perhaps it’ll have a less gaudy, fantastical approach to the era than the Gatsbys we’ve recently encountered and the Midnights we’ve spent in Paris.

Highston, meanwhile, has a curious premise and a ton of big names attached: it’s a contemporary family comedy written by the screenwriter of Nebraska, about a 19-year-old with an imaginary entourage of celebrity companions. It’s executive produced by Sacha Baron Cohen, directed by Little Miss Sunshine’s Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, and stars Chris Parnell and 24‘s Mary Lynn Rajskub as the pop culturally hallucinating teenager’s parents. The other big one to anticipate is One Mississippi, Tig Notaro’s semi-autobiographical show, seeing Tig returning to her Mississippi hometown following her mother’s death.

Apart from that, there’s Edge — based on the book (sorry, not the U2 musician) that’s allegedly described as “the most violent western in print,” which stars Ryan Kwanten (who played True Blood‘s oversexed manchild, Jason Stackhouse) — and Patriot, the political thriller about an intelligence officer tasked with preventing Iran from going nuclear. Amazon will also be releasing Good Girls Revolt, a late 60s period piece that focuses on the cultural revolution’s impact on the particularly crusty, traditional journalism sphere, following “a group of young female researchers who simply ask to be treated fairly.”