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The modern 24/7 news cycle moves at lightning speed. With information spread rapidly across social media, blogs, and citizen reports, even as print publications crumble and digital operations face tough competition for internet traffic, the pressure to be first has never been higher.

Hollywood, faced with compelling news narratives every day, is following suit, moving swiftly to produce films and TV shows that explore the most important stories of our times—even before they’ve finished unfolding.

Case in point: Adam McKay, the filmmaker behind The Big Short and Vice, will soon tackle a limited series about Jeffrey Epstein, Variety reported Wednesday. Part of McKay’s five-year first-look TV deal with HBO, the project will pull from Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown’s still-unpublished book about the scandal. Brown and McKay are to executive-produce, with McKay also directing the pilot.

Brown’s reporting is credited with renewing public interest in Epstein’s links to sex trafficking and ultimately led to his arrest on related charges this past July. The multimillionaire financier died of an apparent suicide the next month while awaiting trial in a New York detention center, though some speculated he was murdered.

In fact, though two months have passed since the official autopsy ruled Epstein’s death a suicide, news of McKay’s planned series came the very same day that a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother claimed Epstein’s fatal injuries were more consistent with homicide.

Dr. Michael Baden, a former New York City medical examiner and Fox News contributor, said on the morning TV show Fox & Friends claimed that some of Epstein’s injuries were “extremely unusual in suicidal hangings and could occur much more commonly in homicidal strangulation.” New York City Chief Medical Examiner Barbara Sampson, whose office performed the autopsy, later on Wednesday defended her office’s original findings, calling their ruling of suicide the result of a “thorough and complete” investigation.

Even as the cause of Epstein’s death remains in dispute, legal battles against his estate, including a half-dozen filed by his accusers, are expected to rage for months to come. More intriguingly, the federal authorities who arrested Epstein still hunt his co-conspirators—among them employees, girlfriends, and business associates—who allegedly enabled and abetted Epstein’s illicit activities. More arrests could be coming down the pipeline, but even if none do, this case isn’t over.

So is McKay moving too fast to build a series around Epstein’s fall from power? That he’s adapting it from a book no one’s yet been able to read makes it doubly uncertain how much of the Epstein story will make it into McKay’s show, and whether he’ll wind up in trouble if another development breaks while cameras are rolling.

But whether that even matters is another question entirely. The race to turn national news into popular entertainment has paid off for McKay before, most notably in his acclaimed, Oscar-nominated take on the global financial crisis. But The Big Short arrived with some distance from its subject, which had been covered extensively by documentary film and academia before McKay’s tongue-in-cheek, populist explainer. Ditto for Vice, which explored the life of vice president Dick Cheney almost a decade after he left office.

As the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel noted, “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk,” meaning we only truly understand the meaning of a chapter in history as we leave it behind; as far as Epstein’s concerned, we can’t be far past noon. But in pushing an Epstein series forward at HBO, McKay must see himself as getting ahead of the pack, and he’s not wrong to feel that way.

While McKay could theoretically restrict the parameters of his Epstein series in a way that makes it less necessary to keep abreast of new developments, a Lifetime docuseries called Surviving Jeffrey Epstein (in the mold of Surviving R. Kelly) is already in the works and would likely be much harder hit if any news breaks related to Epstein’s accusers before it hits airwaves. Actress-comedian Patricia Heaton was at some point also working to produce a project based on Brown’s Miami Herald reporting around Epstein. That project, in the works with Storied Media Group (which represents the film/TV interests of the Herald’s parent company, McClatchy), may fall by the wayside now that McKay is working with Brown directly. If not, there could be competing Epstein series heading to TV as soon as next year.

What’s gained from pushing the day’s biggest news stories toward the screen quickly is obvious: social hyper-relevance, the opportunity’s to add an artist’s flourish to on-going discourse, maybe a few Oscars. Whether Hollywood’s moving too fast to adapt stories like Epstein’s will likely have to be determined when the finished product is rolled out. At their best, these stories can be arresting and eye-opening, At their worst, they can feel like cheap stabs or, even worse, miscalculated lionizations of their subjects. What can also be lost, in the race to get a dramatization of current events made, is any real perspective on what such events mean.

It all goes to show how in ripped-from-the-headlines stories are at the moment. CBS is pressing ahead with a miniseries adapted from A Higher Loyalty, ex-FBI director James Comey’s incendiary account of the events that led up to his firing by President Donald Trump. Jeff Daniels is to play Comey in the series, with Brendan Gleeson portraying Trump. It’ll arrive as soon as next year, dropping into a mightily uncertain political fray; the House just earlier today passed a resolution formalizing its impeachment inquiry into Trump.

Elsewhere, Vanity Fair special correspondent Gabriel Sherman is writing The Apprentice, dramatizing Trump’s rise to power before his time in the Oval Office. It’s another story that could drastically change in tone if Trump is either impeached or re-elected next year, but one of enough interest to Hollywood that Gidden Media’s Amy Baer is keen to get it moving now.

Sherman was also behind The Loudest Voice in the Room, a book on disgraced media mogul Roger Ailes that got adapted into a Showtime miniseries by Spotlight director Tom McCarthy earlier this year; that series, titled The Loudest Voice, explored Ailes’ rise and fall from power while framing him as the shadow architect of Trump’s presidency, his deep focus on tabloid news and political populism weaponized to aid in the former reality TV star’s bid for the Republican nomination. It also looked at his sexual misconduct at Fox News, following some of the women who ultimately stood up to his predations.

Bombshell, out in December, looks at the Ailes story from a different angle, enlisting Hollywood heavy hitters Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron, and Margot Robbie to play various women at Fox News who set out to expose Ailes for sexual harassment. The script, by Big Short cowriter Charles Randolph, was written so soon after Ailes’ ouster that multiple women who spoke to him from the network had to violate NDAs they’d signed to shed light on the network’s toxic culture.

#MeToo stories like Bombshell are especially at the forefront of Hollywood’s current newsroom mentality. New York Times investigative journalists Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey, whose Harvey Weinstein reporting in 2017 would topple the movie executive and win a Pulitzer, will next be the protagonists of thier own movie, written by Colette scribe Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Described as in the vein of All the President’s Men—a film that, now a classic account of the Watergate scandal, was released only two years after Richard Nixon resigned his presidency – it’s been in the works since last year at Plan B and Annapurna, who zeroed in on the story as the perfect basis for a hot-button drama shortly after it broke.

Ronan Farrow’s now-famous reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual misconduct at the top of the film industry ecosystem will also no doubt come to screens in some shape or form. We could be weeks away from hearing about an adaptation of his just-out Catch and Kill, a look at the challenges he faced reporting on his own Weinstein story, including at NBC News, which he alleges killed the story to protect then-news anchor Matt Lauer, since himself ousted over sexual misconduct allegations.

“I wanted to put the book first,” Farrow recently told the Washington Post, “so I’ve kicked that decision [about selling the movie rights] down the road.”

Laughing, Farrow then added: “Not that I’m opposed to it.”