It’s the fate of any good political satire to go from “funny” to “depressingly prophetic” as the years go on. That adage applies to few films as aptly as Barry Levinson’s Wag The Dog, a movie that launched its tale of manufactured conflicts and presidential sex scandals just a month before Monica Lewinsky became a household American name. Now, HBO has announced plans to cash in on Wag The Dog’s predictive cachet, with Deadline reporting that the network is developing a TV series based on the 1997 film.
Levinson has signed on to work on the project, which will take the original’s cynical worldview—in which Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman spun politics, international warfare, and the all-seeing eye of cable news—and apply it to the worlds of entertainment, big business, and non-profits, as well. Rajiv Joseph, who penned the recent Nic Cage political comedy Army Of One, is set to write the script, although it remains to be seen what new indignities he’s found for the fictitious people of Albania to suffer.
