- The multi-season TV series "A Land Remembered" will film in Micanopy on May 20, featuring a flashback to 1860s Georgia scenes.
- Todd Wiseman Jr.'s Tampa-based company produced the $25 million first season funded partly by $1 million in state and Film Tampa Bay grants.
- The series' first four episodes focus on the MacIvey family's 19th-century origins and will air in early 2027 with later seasons continuing the story.
A production company bringing Patrick Smith’s classic Florida novel “A Land Remembered” to screen as a multi-season television series will film in Micanopy in May.
Written and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1984, “A Land Remembered” chronicles three generations of the MacIvey family from the mid-19th to the 20th centuries, as they endure poverty and harsh conditions on the Florida “Cracker” frontier before rising to wealth.
Independent filmmaker Todd Wiseman Jr. is making the series through his private Tampa-based production company, Tobias LLC. The series received $500,000 from the state, which Film Tampa Bay matched to help launch the $25 million first season.
The four episodes of season one will focus on the MacIveys’ first generation and are expected to air in early 2027, followed by season two telling the second generation’s story and the third generation in season three. Wiseman aims to premiere the first two episodes this summer, according to Florida Politics.
As filming locations range from Tampa to Myakka, Hillsborough County film commissioner Tyler Martinolich told News Channel 8, “A Land Remembered” is expected to be the largest production in the Tampa Bay area since “Dolphin Tale” in 2011.
The series’ location manager, Jake Silver, said during a regular Micanopy Town Council meeting on April 14 that the town—known as Florida’s oldest inland town (1821)—will be used to create a flashback sequence of Georgia in the 1860s as the characters are making their way to a homestead in Florida.
Around 100 cast and crew members will work one day of filming in the town on May 20. The only impacts to the town, Silver said, will be temporary road closures and detours and an economic boost from hosting the crew.
On May 19, NE 1st Street leading through downtown Micanopy will be closed and turned into a red clay road. Alternating traffic patterns will allow cars to drive through the back of the set on filming day, before the road is closed again on May 21 for cleanup.
A security company will also stage businesses on NE 1st Street with new windows and doors to look like the 1800s, which Silver said his team had already received approval from the business owners to do.
Although the set will be closed off, filming will accommodate necessary occurrences like fire trucks and ambulances passing through, or someone needing to cross the street.
Micanopy will be included in the show’s credits, and Silver said the production team might put out a local casting call to use Micanopy residents as extras.
“We’re going to take care of the community as best that we can,” he said. “We’re not a big-budget production. We’re an independent film, but we will do the best we can to take care of everybody within our footprint.”
“A Land Remembered” dropped pursuing a permit last week to film at Fort DeSoto Park in Pinellas County following pushback from environmental activists. Some said the production company’s proposed building of a fake fort near dunes would endanger nesting gopher tortoises and rare birds.
