Ben Stiller to Lead HBO Series ‘The Band’ from ‘Search Party’ Co-Creators
It’s taken Ben Stiller 35 years to return in a lead role for TV, but the multihyphenate filmmaker is officially back on the small screen.
Stiller, who infamously left “Saturday Night Live” after only a few episodes to create his own 1990 sketch series “The Ben Stiller Show,” is set to lead HBO series “The Band,” which is currently in development at the network, an individual with knowledge told IndieWire. This will be Stiller’s first lead role in a narrative scripted series, though he previously had cameos in “Arrested Development” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
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Of course, Stiller has more recently been a TV staple behind the scenes: the writer/director/producer is the executive producer and director of “Severance.” He also helmed true crime series “Escape from Dannemora.”
“The Band” is the latest project produced by Stiller’s Red Hour Films. The series is co-created by “Search Party” filmmakers Sarah Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers (“Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later”), who will also each serve as showrunners.
“The Band” will be an hourlong dramedy with Stiller starring as Oscar, a pop impresario and talent mogul whose career is beset by scandal and is tasked with forming a new act in order to save his career – and perhaps his soul. The series is an inside look at the music industry, and as Deadline noted, features Stiller in a “Simon Cowell-esque” role.
“The Band” is executive produced by Stiller, Bliss, Rogers, John Lesher, Savan Kotecha, and Media Res’ Michael Ellenberg and Lindsey Springer. Media Res will serve as co-studio with HBO.
Stiller last year starred in “Nutcrackers” and will be reprising his main role in the long-running “Meet the Parents” franchise alongside fellow original actors Robert De Niro, Teri Polo, and Blythe Danner. The “Meet the Parents” franchise is one of the more successful comedy series ever, with a total franchise gross of over $1.13 billion at the global box office since debuting in 2000. This will be the fourth film.
Stiller recently said during The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast that the comedic tone he became synonymous with in the early and mid 2000s has since become moot.
“You can look at 2000s comedies, and they were a specific kind of thing, a tone, and there were a lot of great things in those comedies that we don’t have now,” Stiller said. “I don’t know if you could recreate that.”
In turn, he opted to shift his directorial focus to series like “Escape from Dannemora” in 2018.
“The only part of it that was nagging at me is, I liked to do other kinds of movies as a filmmaker and I never really stopped to make the time to do that,” Stiller recalled thinking at the time.
Deadline first reported the news.
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