HBO
is developing a comedy set in the world of a
sugar
baby – where an older person dates a younger person with the promise of money and gifts.
Sugar
comes from Canadian filmmaker
Emma Seligman
and
Adam McKay
and his Hyperobject Industries production company.
The half-hour project follows a young woman in New York who balances her neurotic Jewish family with her life as a college sugar baby.
It is timely given the news about a certain Congressman from a certain southern state.
Seligman will write and direct the pilot and will exec produce alongside McKay and Hyperobject Industries’ Betsy Koch. Shiva Baby producers Lizzie Shapiro, Kieran Altman, and Katie Schiller will co-produce.
Seligman is behind
Shiva Baby
, which was a SXSW short film that she adapted into a feature film starring Rachel Sennott, Polly Draper, Dianna Agron, Molly Gordon, Fred Melamed and Danny Deferrari. The film was released by Utopia on April. She is also co-writing feature film
Bottoms
, about two unpopular queer girls who start a fight club to have sex before they graduate, with Sennott for Orion Pictures that is being produced by Brownstone Production’s Elizabeth Banks, Max Handelman and Alison Small.
It is McKay and Hyperobject Industries’ latest project at HBO.
The Big Short
director, who is an exec producer on
Succession
, is behind the network’s 1980s Los Angeles Lakers series, and a limited series about Jeffrey Epstein, based on Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown’s upcoming book, as well as a limited series based on Bong Joon Ho’s
Parasite
.
He also exec produced recent HBO documentaries
Q: Into the Storm
and
537 Votes.
Seligman is represented by WME and Brillstein Entertainment Partners and McKay is represented by WME and Ziffren Brittenham LLP.