Last year we were super excited when it was announced that HBO was bringing a TV adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s National Book Award-winning novel The Corrections to the network. We even cast the entire show. Then in May, the disappointing news came out that HBO had passed on the pilot. Apparently, while they enjoyed the performances delivered by an all-star cast that included Chris Cooper, Dianne Wiest, Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rhys Ifans and Greta Gerwig, executives worried that all of the chronological jumping around that happens in the story wouldn’t translate to TV. Still, we held out hope that another network (maybe Showtime?) would pick up the discarded project and run with it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
“I think ‘The Corrections’ is not going to happen,” Noah Baumbach — who directed the pilot and co-wrote the script with Franzen — recently told The Playlist. “It was never finished. We shot a pilot, but we didn’t shoot a whole pilot, even.”
Are you as disappointed as we are to hear that this project — which apparently could have included James Murphy playing Gary — if officially dead in the water? Or did you think that any attempt to bring the Lamberts to the small-screen was doomed from the start?