NBC Is Planning A George Washington TV Drama

Looks like presidential biographies are the new trend.

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Forget about superheroes or vampire novels because it looks like presidential biographies are the new cash cow in Hollywood. And after the success of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, The Hollywood Reporter has broken the news that NBC will counter with a TV drama based on the life of George Washington. Based partly on Ron Chernow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Washington: A Life, this series will move back and forth between Washington’s life as a war hero and as the country’s first president.

"There's George Washington the national icon, gazing out from the dollar bill with his mouthful of supposedly wooden teeth, and then there's the George Washington who had an adulterous affair with his best friend's wife," said David Seidler, who will write the script for the show. "The George Washington obsessed with social status, finely tailored clothes, his image. Not an icon, a very human human being, who learned how to lead. That’s the man I want to understand.”

The pilot of the show, which is just titled George Washington for now, will be directed by Barry Levinson, and with no definitive Washington movie biopic in existence, this show might be the next best thing. Between this project, Lincoln, and Ken Burns’ stellar Thomas Jefferson documentary, the Mount Rushmore of on-screen presidential biographies is almost complete. Now we just need someone to get to work on a proper Teddy Roosevelt project and we’ll be happy.

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[via THR]

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