Fans of Peep Show can rejoice and/or lament, because Variety reports that the long-running British sitcom, which aired nine seasons between 2003 and 2015 on the U.K.’s Channel 4, is currently being developed over at Starz. Hooray! Or maybe boo! Who knows yet?!
As fans of the series are aware, Peep Show followed hapless, polar opposite roommates, Mark and Jez (played by British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, respectively), and was unique in that it was shot completely in first person perspective of the show’s characters.
The good news: Series creators Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong will be involved in a consulting producer capacity, and Eli Jorne, who previously worked on Starz’s Blunt Talk and Wilfred, as well as co-created Fox’s upcoming Son of Zorn, will be serving as showrunner.
“We are hugely relieved to hand over the responsibility of coming up with the dark and twisted thoughts of two terrible men to the extremely funny, dark and twisted Eli Jorne,” Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong said jointly in a statement.
This is the third time an attempt has been made to adapt Peep Show for American audiences. In 2005, Fox gave it a shot with two writers from That ’70s Show, but it didn’t make it past the script stage, and then again in 2008, Bain and Armstrong put together a script for Spike TV, but it never went anywhere.
American networks don’t have the best track record when it comes to adapting British TV, save for precious few examples (The Office, obviously, and Veep, which was loosely based on The Thick of It), but Starz seems like one of the precious few networks that might actually be able to pull it off. We’ll just have to wait and see.
In the meantime, American Mark and Jez dream casting? Go!
(Via Variety, RadioTimes)
