Natalie Portman developing TV series based on Judith Krantz novel she read because she's a grown-up

By Sean O'Neal | January 31, 2012 | 5:22pm

Aux Features TV

The sexual awakening of Natalie Portman continues with the news that the actress who has had sleepovers—WITH BOYS, DAD—is now getting into novelist Judith Krantz, the writer who guided so many a young woman (and occasional young man) through puberty with her novels full of flowery descriptions of blowjobs and glory holes. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Portman will partner with Krantz’s son Tony to executive produce an ABC series adaptation of Scruples, Krantz’s 1978 debut and the book that cemented Krantz’s reputation as one of the standard-bearers of the “money, sex, and power” novel. It was also, no doubt, indirectly responsible for hundreds of girls born in the ‘80s being saddled with the name “Valentine.”

CBS made its own attempt to craft a weekly Scruples in 1980, in the wake of a successful miniseries starring Lindsay Wagner and Kim Cattrall. And just like that early version, Portman and Krantz’s pilot will retain its late-’70s setting in telling the story of a socialite who opens the titular fashion boutique after the death of her husband, then gets involved in various soap opera scandals. Anyway, picking up from there should allow ABC to sort of gloss over those long, graphic descriptions of the main character’s early sex education that account for the first half or so of the book. That sort of smut may fly within the anything-goes hedonism of Natalie Portman and those friends of hers, but certainly not while she’s under America’s roof.