Novelist, NBC unite for divorce project
By Nellie Andreeva
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Novelist Gigi Levangie Grazer, whose best-seller "The Starter Wife" became a critically and commercially successful miniseries for USA Network, is venturing into series television with a comedy-drama at NBC.
The project revolves around a couple in their 30s who are going though a divorce, but continue to live together.
"The theme of it can be summed up as, 'I hate you, hold me,"' said Levangie Grazer, who is in the process of divorcing her second husband, producer Brian Grazer. "It's taking on the idea that divorce is the new marriage."
Levangie Grazer thinks that acrimonious divorces are "so 1990s," replaced by happily co-existing exes in the mold of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis. She even coined a term for today's men who remain in their former wives' lives.
"He is a was-husband, not ex-husband," Levangie Grazer said. "I think there is a new, evolved way to get through divorce, and I hope to capture that."
In the untitled project, which has received a script commitment from the network, the divorcing couple -- a college professor moonlighting as a controversial political blogger, and his wife, who works at a private school and volunteers at a juvenile prison -- don't have enough money to separate right away, so the husband continues to live under the same roof with his wife and their two children, ages 14 and 8.
"It's not 'War of the Roses,' but there is a lot of conflict as they're trying to navigate in-laws, dating and friends," Levangie Grazer said.
Levangie Grazer took her first stab at writing series television in 2004 with "The Colony," a pilot script for ABC set at Malibu Colony.
On the longform side, she recently teamed with Lifetime to develop a miniseries based on her novel "Maneater."
"The Starter Wife," starring Debra Messing as a woman coming to grips with her new place in Hollywood after being dumped by her studio-executive husband for a younger model, earned 10 Emmy nominations. USA has been mulling turning it into a series.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
