God of the Woods Is Filming on Netflix Right Now. The Author Is Running the Show.
Liz Moore's bestselling 2024 thriller is in production at Netflix. Filming started June 12, 2026. Maya Hawke plays the first female investigator at the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Kerry Condon plays the mother of a missing girl. Moore is co-showrunning her own adaptation.
The God of the Woods started filming on June 12, 2026. The production runs through October 1. Liz Moore wrote the novel. She is also co-showrunning the series, alongside writer Liz Hannah. Two women named Liz are running a Netflix production together based on a book one of them wrote.
Production is live. No premiere date has been set. Based on the production timeline, the earliest Netflix release would be late 2027.
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What the Story Is
The God of the Woods is a thriller set in the Adirondacks. A 13-year-old girl goes missing from a summer camp in the summer of 1975. The disappearance echoes one from years earlier at the same camp, a different missing child. Judy Luptack is sent to investigate. She is the first female investigator in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, working in an institution built to exclude people who look like her. Alice Van Laar is the missing girl's mother, trapped in a deteriorating marriage to the man who owns the camp, carrying grief she has never been allowed to process.
The novel was published in 2024 and became one of the most discussed literary thrillers of the year. It reached readers in the space between domestic thriller and literary fiction: structurally precise but emotionally driven.
The Casting
Maya Hawke brings a specific kind of stillness to roles that require a character to be underestimated before being proven right. Judy Luptack is positioned from the start as an outsider in a room full of men who do not want her there. That tension requires an actress who can play competence as a quiet fact rather than a performance.
Kerry Condon has spent a career playing women under pressure from systems they did not design. Alice Van Laar is written to be the most constrained character in the book. She owns almost nothing in her own life, including the grief she is required to carry in the right way. Condon plays containment and its limits better than almost anyone working right now.
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The Author-as-Showrunner Question
Moore and Hannah as co-showrunners is a meaningful production choice. Adaptations that bring in outside showrunners frequently restructure the source material in ways that preserve surface plot while losing the interior logic of the original. When the author has a seat at the table with actual authority, not just an EP credit, the chances of that interior logic surviving increase.
It does not guarantee a faithful adaptation. Showrunning is a different craft from novel-writing. Moore is working alongside Hannah, who brings television production experience Moore does not have. The co-showrunner structure acknowledges both things: the author's knowledge of the material, and the need for someone who knows how series television actually works.
Hugh Howey's involvement in Silo is the most visible recent example of what author presence across a long production can protect. Moore's involvement from the start sets a similar condition.
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Sources: Netflix Tudum, Deadline, What's on Netflix, The Playlist, Variety