Netflix harvests Andrew Scott’s Talented Mr. Ripley show from Showtime’s carcass
The series, based on Patricia Highsmith's celebrated crime novels, will now jump ship to Netflix
Aux News Netflix
Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is one of crime literature’s great opportunist: A practiced con man and manipulator with a near-inhuman talent for sensing the weaknesses of others, and then exploiting them for his own gain. We can only hope he’d be mildly impressed by Netflix today, then, which appears to have stopped by to watch Showtime be absorbed into the fleshy bulk of streaming service Paramount+, and paused to briefly pluck Andrew Scott’s long-in-the-works Ripley show from its still-screaming carcass.
This is per THR, which reports that the Scott series—which will see the Fleabag Attractive Deacon take on the role of Ripley, previously played by the likes of Matt Damon and John Malkovich in film—will now air on Netflix, rather than its original cable home. The Ripley series was originally announced back in 2019—although noise about its development has been kicking around since at least 2015—and was set to get an 8-episode first season at Showtime. Veteran screenwriter and director Steven Zailian (most recently of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman) is set to serve as a showrunner on the series. From the casting—which includes Johnny Flynn as Ripley’s first major mark, Dickie Greenleaf, and Dakota Fanning as Dickie’s girlfriend friend Marge—it sounds like the show will at least start with with The Talented Mr. Ripley, and not at a later point in Ripley’s career of idle rich guy living, art forgery, and occasional murder.
Paramount announced late last month that it was folding Showtime into the Paramount+ corpus, essentially ending the network’s 40-plus year run as a somewhat independent entity. The network/service (because what’s the difference anymore?) pretty much immediately started shuffling shows around or canceling them as soon as the news broke.
7 Comments
Im curious how they handle Marge. The movie version (Gwyneth Paltrow) was wildly different than the book but it worked really well.Flynn is perfect casting, and Andrew Scott can ACT, though he seems a little mature for the Dickie Greenleaf stuff
Agreed, I think this is one of the few cases where the movie was better than the book, though I might be a bit biased since I saw the movie first and loved it so much I wound up watching it several more times over the years. The book was alright, but it was also very dry and once I’d finished it I really had no desire to continue reading the series.I was surprised by some of the changes the movie made though, like how *spoilers* in the movie Tom killing Dickie on the boat was more a sudden spur-of-the-moment crime of passion, whereas in the book Tom planned to do so from the start. I think I also preferred Paltrow’s take on Marge in the movie and how she eventually figured out Tom killed Dickie but nobody believed her, whereas in the book she’s much more of a bumbling idiot who has no idea how awful Tom is. In fact if I recall correctly in the book Tom plans to murder Marge solely because of how irritatingly useless he thinks she is, but then he stays his hand at the 11th hour out of pity *end spoilers*I hope this series finally does get off the ground with Netflix’s backing, I think Andrew Scott would be great as Tom, especially after seeing how well he can play the conniving and clever villain in Sherlock.
and Showtime just got Netflix’s Uncoupled… so it was a trade I guess.
Attractive Deacon??I think the label at the time was Hot Priest.Or maybe that was just me.
Why did you demote Scott from Fleabag’s Hot Priest to…Attractive Deacon?!! WTF. That’s just wrong and probably blasphemous.
They already have You, which is basically Straight Ripley. But will watch! Fuck it.
I’m not that familiar with Andrew Scott, but from the picture above he looks a lot like the late Bill Paxton. There should be a biopic of Paxton and Scott can play him.