Issa Rae and Adam McKay are adapting the podcast Nice White Parents into an HBO series following a competitive bidding war that included the Obamas and Netflix.
The network has won the rights to adapt the five-part New York Times and Serial Productions podcast as a half-hour comedy. It has already given the project a pilot commitment.
The podcast launched in July and focused on building a better school system and the obstacles that get in the way of doing so. The Nice White Parents series is being described as a satirical look at the conflict and comedy that arise when highly resourced white parents, who claim to have the best intentions, wield their influence over generations of black and brown students within the NY public school system.
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The series will be executive produced by Rae and Montrel McKay through their HooRae banner along with Hyperorbject Industries’ Adam McKay and Todd Schulman. Serial Productions’ Chana Joffe-Walt, Julie Snyder, Alissa Shipp, and Sarah Koenig will also be serving as executive producers as well as 3 Arts Entertainment’s Dave Becky and Jonathan Berry. HooRae’s Sara Rastogi is also set as a producer.
The project marks Rae and McKay’s latest collaboration with HBO. Both have overall deals with the premium cable network. In addition to Insecure, Rae also exec produces HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show and is attached to star in and EP the Cabbage Patch-focused limited series The Dolls. Adam McKay, meanwhile, exec produces HBO breakout hit Succession and has several other projects in the works at HBO and streamer HBO Max via his company’s rich five-year deal with the WarnerMedia-backed outlets. He’s also readying climate change anthology The Uninhabitable Earth for HBO Max, a drama about the 1980s-era L.A. Lakers, a limited series about Jeffrey Epstein and an adaptation of Parasite for the premium cable network.
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The project is the latest addition to McKay’s growing list of HBO projects which includes: a climate anthology series The Uninhabitable Earth; an L.A. Lakers drama; Bong Joon-Ho‘s Parasite limited series; and the upcoming third season of Succession.