Jason Bateman to Star In and Direct Limited Series at Netflix Based on Esquire Article DADDY BALL
Actor and director Jason Bateman (Ozark) is taking on a new limited dark comedy series based on David Gauvey Herbert’s 2021 Esquire magazine article “Daddy Ball.” Netflix and Aggregate won in the bidding war to secure the rights to the story. They will find a new title, but the source material will be developed as an 8-episode limited series Bateman will both star in and direct.
“The article starts the way most dad-on-dad youth-sports rivalries do. But on the Long Island Inferno, two fathers, both with complicated pasts, took it all too far. There were claims of stalking, corrupt cops, and mob connections. Neither man was ever the same.
“Determined not to follow in his detached father’s footsteps, Bobby Sanfilippo found himself doing quite the opposite with his son. He became entangled in an epic travel baseball dad-on-dad rivalry with a man named John Reardon that led tabloids to call him ‘a Suffolk County Steinbrenner,’ ‘seriously sick,’ and one of the worst dads in youth-sports history. It starts in the world of little league baseball and expands into a BEEF-like war between two smalltime criminal fathers. Both Sanfilippo and Reardon have rap sheets of their own, but what went down in the summer of 2012 at Baseball Heaven will define them and their families forever. Stalking claims, threatening text messages, and an unwarranted arrest later, at the heart of it all, it’s a story about the lengths fathers will go for their sons.”
This sounds like a wild ride of a story! Bateman is a great actor for the part, and I look forward to checking it out. We will let you know more about the series as it moves forward.
via: Deadline