As Noah Baumbach’s comedy drama Jay Kelly makes noise at the Venice Film Festival, it has emerged that the director is moving into television for the first time in over ten years.
Baumbach is developing a series adaptation of Andrew Ridker’s novel Hope with A24.
Baumbach has previously worked with the studio on While We’re Young, his 2014 film starring Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfriend.
The move was disclosed in a longform profile of the notoriously press shy company in the New Yorker.
Hope, set over one year in 2013, tells the story of the Greenspans, who are the envy of Brookline, Massachusetts, an idyllic and idealistic suburb west of Boston. Scott Greenspan is a successful physician with his own cardiology practice. His wife, Deb, is a pillar of the community who spends her free time helping resettle refugees. Their daughter, Maya, works at a distinguished New York publishing house and their son, Gideon, is preparing to follow in his father’s footsteps. They are an exceptional family from an exceptional place, living in exceptional times.
But when Scott is caught falsifying blood samples at work, he sets in motion a series of scandals that threatens to shatter his family. Deb leaves him for a female power broker; Maya rekindles a hazardous affair from her youth; and Gideon drops out of college to go on a dangerous journey that will put his principles to the test.
The book was published by Penguin last year.
Baumbach, the director behind Marriage Story, White Noise and The Squid and the Whale, last worked in television in 2012 when he directed a pilot based on Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for HBO.
In 2015, Baumbach said of the project, “I left it with a real appreciation for what is distinctly television and what is distinctly movies. Sometimes that gets conflated because we’re all talking about how we’re in a golden age of TV and TV is where more interesting stuff is going on. But I think what gets lost in that sometimes is that it’s really a different medium. For me, the challenge of looking at something over a long period of time, that was ongoing and had no end, where you’re just re-generating story for every episode.”
Earlier in his career, he wrote the Thomas Schlamme-directed TV movie Thirty, which starred the likes of Eric Stoltz and Joanna Going.
On the TV side, A24 is behind series such as HBO’s Euphoria, Netflix’s Beef and Prime Video’s Overcompensating as well as Apple’s upcoming Margo’s Got Money Troubles.
The post Noah Baumbach Developing Andrew Ridker’s Novel ‘Hope’ As Series With A24, Marking ‘Jay Kelly’ Director’s First Move In TV In Over 10 Years appeared first on Deadline.
