Jeff Daniels To Star In ‘Dilettante’ NY Media Drama In Works At Apple From Dana Brown, ‘Julia’ Creator & Berlanti Prods.
EXCLUSIVE: Apple TV+ has landed for development Dilettante, a series starring Jeff Daniels as a character that will likely get the New York media circles buzzing, Deadline has learned. The project, from Warner Bros. TV and studio-based Berlanti Productions, is inspired by Dana Brown’s memoir about working for former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.
Written by Brown and Julia creator Daniel Goldfarb, Dilettante is described as a fictionalized coming-of-age story set in the glamorous and cutthroat “Golden Age” of magazines in 1990s New York.
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Daniels will play a fictional magazine editor that is certain to draw parallels to Carter the way another work of fiction about a young assistant to a powerful New York magazine editor, the movie The Devil Wears Prada, has been evoking Anna Wintour as a prototype for its editor character played by Meryl Streep.
Jeff Bridges previously played a magazine editor loosely based on Carter in the 2008 movie How to Lose Friends & Alienate People.
Brown and Goldfarb executive produce Dilettante with Berlanti Prods.’ Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter and Leigh London Redman.
Reps for Apple TV+ and WBTV declined comment.
Brown worked in hospitality before becoming Vanity Fair editor Carter’s assistant and later deputy editor of the Condé Nast magazine. In his memoir, published in 2022 by Random House, Brown details becoming a trusted confidante to Carter, attending swanky media events, including the Oscars, and having run-ins with the likes of Wintour, Lee Radziwill, Seth Rogen and Caitlyn Jenner.
Berlanti Prods. and WBTV optioned Dilettante: True Tales of Excess, Triumph, and Disaster in 2023. At the time, Brown jokingly described the potential series as “kind of like Suits but with the backstabbing of Succession”, admitting that he hadn’t really watched the USA Network legal drama.
Daniels, Emmy winner for The Newsroom and Godless, recently starred in the series American Rust, which ran for two seasons across Showtime and Prime Video, and in Netflix’s limited series A Man In Full. Next up, Daniels will portray Former President Ronald Reagan in the upcoming Cold War film, Reykjavik. Daniels is repped by LBI and Martino Management.
Brown executive produced the feature film Shelter (2015), produced and co-wrote the documentary All the Streets Are Silent (2021), and co-wrote and produced the feature Harvest Moon. He is repped by UTA.
Goldfarb is the creator of Max’s Julia, starring Sarah Lancashire and David Hyde Pierce. He also worked as a writer/producer on Amazon’s Emmy-winning The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel for three seasons. In features, he is writing the upcoming adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for producer Scott Sanders and director Jon M. Chu at Amazon. Goldfarb is repped by CAA, Manage-ment, and Schreck Rose Dapello.
Berlanti Productions’ current scripted series include NBC’s Found and Brilliant Minds, Netflix’s You, and The CW’s All American. Berlanti is repped by CAA.
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