Could you possibly imagine dear sweet Paul Rudd charming his way into someone’s life and slowly but surely taking over? Based on the ever-increasing amount of Paul Rudd dancing GIFs that I use on Twitter, I find that scenario very plausible, but now I’m going to get the chance to find it very entertaining. And so are you! According to THR, Rudd is set to play a successful therapist who starts infecting the life of one of his patients (played by Will Ferrell) in an adaptation of The Shrink Next Door podcast that will focus on “how a seemingly normal doctor-patient dynamic morphs into an unprecedentedly exploitative one filled with manipulation, power grabs, and dysfunction at its finest.” Fun!
While THR lists the potential show as a “dark comedy,” it’s an open question whether it’ll be a DARK comedy or dark COMEDY, because there is a tonal difference and evidence that Anchorman co-stars Rudd and Ferrell won’t automatically lean toward the more comedic approach. Specifically, their most recent work.
Rudd’s Living With Yourself has moments of comedy and slapstick, but it’s primarily a weighty meditation on the creep of irrelevancy. Ferrell is currently starring in Nat Faxon and Jim Rash’s Force Majeure remake, Downhill. In the film, he plays it mostly dry as a man doing a terrible job of living up to the responsibilities of husbandhood and fatherhood during a low-level midlife crisis/ski trip.
Considering those separate track records and the icky subject matter here (which conjures memories of tabloid stories about impressionable stars letting dastardly con people take the wheel and run their lives into the ground), it seems likely that, at the very least, we can assume nuance and some courtship of the kinds of awards that come from playing around with heavier things (particularly ones based on true events). For now, though, this project is being dangled in front of hungry executives from various networks gathered to see who loads the cash cannon quickest and most effectively before firing it at Rudd and Ferrell for their approval. That’s a dramatization of the process of people shopping a TV show around, but didn’t we have more fun reading it that way? More news about where and when this will land whenever it comes to be.
Source: THR
