Jeffrey Eugenides Finally Gets His FX Series — It Only Took Fifteen Years
Jeffrey Eugenides published The Marriage Plot in 2011. Fifteen years later, FX has decided the world is ready for a prestige television adaptation of a novel about a college student torn between two men and Roland Barthes. This is either the best news of the week or proof that the literary fiction industrial complex never rests.
The project has genuine pedigree. Hiro Murai — the director behind Atlanta's most unsettling episodes and the criminally underrated Mr. & Mrs. Smith reboot — will helm the series. Will Arbery, whose play Heroes of the Fourth Turning was one of the decade's most discussed theatrical works before he found his voice as a Succession writer, will adapt. These are not hacks. These are people who understand that certain stories require a delicate hand and a willingness to be strange.
Sadie Sink — who made The Whale watchable and Stranger Things something more than nostalgia product — will play Madeleine Hanna, the literary-theory-obsessed Brown University student caught in the gravitational pull of a bipolar genius and a spiritually searching philosopher. She will also executive-produce. Jeffrey Eugenides himself is on board alongside Jason Bateman's production company, which is either reassuring (the author controls the material) or alarming (the author never knows when to let go).
The Marriage Plot was, upon publication, a fairly divisive book. The campus novel doesn't travel well outside its moment; what reads as acute social observation in 2011 can calcify into period piece by 2026. But Eugenides — author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex — has always understood how to make the interior life of a character feel genuinely cinematic. Madeleine's obsession with literary theory, her catastrophic taste in men, her slow discovery of what she actually wants from literature and from love: these are the building blocks of television drama, not just literary fiction.
The question, of course, is whether any of this survives the journey from page to screen. Roland Barthes does not exactly make for compelling exposition. Then again, neither does Proust, and someone turned that into a three-part French television event that won prizes. Stranger things have happened, as Sadie Sink would know.