It's Colin Jost's turn to try the "comedian to drama series drug lord" pivot

Specifically, Jost has been attached to star in a new Peacock series about Larry Lavin, a suburban dentist who had a sideline running a hefty cocaine distribution empire on the East Coast in the 1970s and 1980s. (Sometimes dubbed “The Yuppie Conspiracy.”) The show itself doesn’t have a title yet, but Variety notes that it’s based on the first season of the Audacy podcast Wolves Among Us, which details Lavin’s rise, rinse, spit, and fall. 

We’ll be honest: While we can kind of see why Jost might feel like a good fit for this—at the risk of being mean, he doesn’t not look like “a dentist who also deals cocaine”—but he also seems like an unlikely candidate for a pivot to serious acting. His resumé is notably light on any such roles; heck, he hardly even pops up in sketches on SNL, largely content to just play himself while lobbing jokes from the Update desk. But Jost was apparently interested enough in this project to not only star in it, but executive produce, through his No Notes Productions company. Meanwhile, his showrunner on the project, Alex Barnow, appears to be attempting a bit of a “comedy guy to serious drama” pivot of his own: Although he co-wrote the screenplay for 2019’s Samuel L. Jackson Shaft movie, he’s also primarily a comedy guy, having spent the last several years as the showrunner for The Goldbergs at ABC. It is, in other words, a pretty weird set of guys to be making a TV show about a real-life drug kingpin—even if he was also a dentist and a suburban dad.