Noah Baumbach Developing Andrew Ridker’s Novel HOPE into a Series with A24
As Noah Baumbach’s latest film Jay Kelly makes waves at the Venice Film Festival, it looks like the filmmaker is stepping back into television for the first time in more than a decade. Baumbach is teaming up with A24 to adapt Andrew Ridker’s acclaimed novel Hope into a series.
This isn’t the first time Baumbach has collaborated with A24 as they distributed his 2014 film While We’re Young, which starred Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, and Amanda Seyfried.
Hope is set over one year in 2013, it “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.
Baumbach has a long history of exploring complex family dynamics in films like The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story, and White Noise, making him a perfect fit for Ridker’s sharp, layered novel.
But his return to television is especially interesting, considering his last attempt came in 2012 with HBO’s pilot for The Corrections, an adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s book. That project ultimately didn’t move forward.
In 2015, he reflected on the experience, saying, “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.”
I’m sure that Baumbach will develop a solid family drama series.
Source: Deadline