The Nanny Diaries Is Coming to Netflix as a Series — With Scarlett Johansson Producing
Do you remember when Scarlett Johansson was Annie, the broke college student looking after the insufferable Grayer X for the terrifying Mrs. X of the Upper East Side? That was 2007. Johansson was twenty-two and the film adaptation of The Nanny Diaries was, by many critics' estimation, "fine." Neither good nor bad. Fine.
Netflix is now looking to revive that universe — the one populated by Upper East Side dynasties, ten-million-dollar apartments, and the invisible labor that sustains them — but this time as a series. And Johansson won't be Annie. She'll be executive producer.
The project is in development: writers Amy Chozick (House of Cards) and Jenny Bicks (Sex and the City) serve as showrunners alongside Greg Berlanti as producer. The source material, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus's novel from 2002, was a genuine phenomenon: a satire of New York's upper class told from within, from the perspective of someone paid to raise their children while watching money deform everything it touches.
The book was ahead of its time because, before "care work" existed as a political category, it was already narrating it — with sharp humor and zero sentimentality. Annie was not the first or last nanny to wonder whether that family saw her as a person. That question has not dated. The long-form series format, unlike a 100-minute film, has room to sit with the moral complexity: the complicity, the class anxiety, the guilt, the gratitude.
Mary McCarthy pulled off something similar in the sixties with The Group: privileged women examined from the inside without mercy, without a narrator standing outside to deliver a verdict.
No title, no premiere date. The series moves forward. Meanwhile, if you haven't read McLaughlin and Kraus's novel, it remains a perfect X-ray of how a certain class behaves when it believes no one is watching. Spoiler: someone always is.
