Season 1 of IFC’s The Spoils of Babylon was one of the bigger, weirder, more ambitious comedic endeavors we’ve seen in a long time. The show brought in everyone from Tobey Maguire to Kristen Wiig to Jessica Alba to Val Kilmer to tell a generations-long, Gone With the Wind/Dallas-esque saga about the trials and tribulations of the fictional Morehouse family, all of which was based on a fake book by a fake author, who was played by Will Ferrell. There was incest and slapping. So very much incest and slapping. (See below.)
And now, as of this morning, per the press release IFC just put out, there’s going to be more of it, with a whole new plot and star-studded cast.
Author-director-writer Eric Jonrosh (played by Will Ferrell) will be returning as the wine loving bon vivant who opens and closes each riveting episode with his personal insight. A new all-star cast will round out the comedic miniseries. The Spoils Before Dying is executive produced by Ferrell, Adam McKay, Matt Piedmont, Andrew Steele and Nate Young. Steele and Piedmont return as writers, with Piedmont also directing.
The Spoils Before Dying, based on Jonrosh’s first best-selling novel, will take viewers into the seedy underbelly of the 1950s jazz scene, in a detective story positively buzzing with erotic charge. It follows a jazz-pianist turned private eye who becomes embroiled in a murder investigation that spins out of control and leads him down paths – romantic and otherwise – he never expected.
When I first saw that IFC was making a second season of this show, I was a little worried about, like, where they would even go from the first one. There was a lot going on in there, and all of it — to paraphrase a famous Internet horse — happened so much. But then I read the second paragraph of that blockquote and they went and sucked me right back in. I mean, “a jazz-pianist turned private eye who becomes embroiled in a murder investigation that spins out of control”? Yup. That’ll do it. You have my attention, IFC.
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