Yahoo News A24 Wins Yet Another Wild Bidding War (Exclusive)
A24 has won yet another major bidding war.
This time, the indie studio outbid stiff competition for the rights to turn true-crime podcast The Girlfriends, from iHeartPodcasts and Novel, into a television series. The weekly podcast, which launched in the summer, tells the real-life story of a group of women who band together to put a murderous ex behind bars. And though details of the TV version are being kept under wraps, Michael Showalter and his Semi-Formal Productions are already attached.
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Showalter, who’s on a hot streak with a string of recent successes across TV (The Dropout) and film (The Eyes of Tammy Faye), is set to direct, with Semi-Formal partner Jordana Mollick executive producing. She’ll be joined by fellow EPs Conal Byrne, Will Pearson and Carrie Lieberman of iHeartPodcasts, and Julia Bromberg and Neil Krishnan of Novel.
The news comes as the broader IP market has only grown frothier amid the historic dual Hollywood strikes, which ground production to a halt and left the industry with little else to sell. In that time, private-equity backed A24 is said to be among the most aggressive buyers, regularly winning bidding wars for material, including another recent competitive victory with Paris Hilton’s memoir, which it will produce for TV alongside Hilton’s entertainment company 11:11 Media, Dakota and Elle Fanning’s Lewellen Pictures, and David Bernad’s Middle Child Pictures.
Assuming Girlfriends ultimately makes it to air, it would join an already prolific A24 slate, which features HBO’s Euphoria, Netflix’s Beef and upcoming series The Sympathizer, starring Robert Downey Jr. for HBO, and The Curse, fronted by Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, at Showtime. On the film side, A24 was behind this year’s Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All at Once.
For its part, Semi-Formal Productions was founded in 2018 with a mission to tell heartfelt stories that are at once edgy, contemporary and socially aware. Semi-Formal entries have included the Showalter-helmed Spoiler Alert, based on journalist Michael Ausiello’s memoir, and the Will Ferrell/Paul Rudd Apple TV+ series The Shrink Next Door, adapted from another popular podcast. Up next is the Anne Hathaway-led film, The Idea of You, which Showalter directed and produced for Amazon, based on the best-selling novel of the same name.
As a press release characterized Girlfriends upon its release in the summer, the podcast diverges from most true crime offerings in that it’s not actually about the murderer, Bob Bierenbaum. Instead, it’s about his wife, Gail, and a sisterhood of women who dated him and could have suffered the same fate she did. (Bierenbaum was ultimately arrested in 1999 and found guilty and sentenced to a life in prison the following year; he finally confessed to murdering Gail in 2020.) The podcast is hosted by Carole Fisher, one of the aforementioned girlfriends, and is produced in partnership with No More, a global nonprofit dedicated to ending domestic and sexual violence.
UTA brokered the rights deal. WME was also involved. Showalter is repped by UTA, Artists First and Goodman Genow.
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