It’s time for another installment of “Adaptation Snake,” where we take a look at the long and winding road some stories take from their initial creation to modern times. We start with the legendary Greek figure Pygmalion, a major player in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Jump forward a few centuries and we land on George Bernard Shaw’s highly popular stage play Pygmalion, which was then turned into Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical My Fair Lady. George Cukor then adapted this for his 1964 film musical, with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. And now, in 2014, ABC will be modernizing the film for a half-hour sitcom called Selfie, and they’ve landed Doctor Who actress Karen Gillan to take the lead.
That was quite a mouthful, wasn’t it? At least it wasn’t marbles. Suburgatory creator Emily Kapnek will be executive producing through her Warner Bros. Television banner Piece of Pie Productions, and she’ll also be writing the pilot’s script. Julie Anne Robinson — whose work you've likely seen on a variety of series over the years including Weeds, Grey’s Anatomy and most recently Brooklyn Nine-Nine — is set to direct. Oh, and she was also involved with Kapnek's Suburgatory, too.
Gillan, who was companion Amy Pond to Matt Smith’s eleventh version of the Time Lord on Who, will play Eliza Dooley, a self-obsessed woman in her twenties who finds her public life overtaking her private life following an embarrassing break-up that makes its way online through a viral video. Her social media life is more popular than it’s ever been, and she must hire a marketing agency to help her to turn her image around. THR doesn’t mention what line of work she’s in, but she must be in entertainment or something, as I can’t imagine an everyday woman would even bother with any of this. And if she is, then that kind of skews Regular Joe’s (or Joan’s) rise to classy heights than the original story documents. One might assume they’re just using the source material as a recognition factor to make it more popular.
It’ll be great to see Gillan on U.S. TV more, and in a show that isn’t as ridiculous as Adult Swim’s NTSF: SD: SUV, assuming that Selfie’s plot isn’t unintentionally ridiculous. She’ll be all over theaters in 2014, with Harris Goldberg’s romantic comedy The List hitting at some point this year and Mike Flanagan’s highly anticipated horror Oculus coming out in the next few months. She’ll also be seen this summer in a little indie flick from Marvel called Guardians of the Galaxy. But that’ll probably only play in New York and L.A., right?
Stay tuned to see if this show gets any traction down the road, and in the meantime try and get this song out of your head.
