April 14, 2023, 1:50pm
Lit Hub Superfan Olivia Wilde is teaming up with powerhouse indie A24 to bring Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit From the Good Squad, as well as its 2022 sequel (of sorts) The Candy House, to the small screen.
This will be the first major foray into television directing for the in-demand Wilde, a rising star who has, in my opinion, been treated very unfairly by both the jaundiced gutter press and the rabid online fan communities that have mushroomed up around popular song and dance man Harry Styles (Wilde’s ex-beau).
A Visit from the Goon Squad—a stylistically innovative novel in 13 interrelated stories with a large set of characters all connected to Bennie Salazar, a record company executive, and his assistant, Sasha—was a bonafide publishing sensation upon its release in 2010, winning both the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, receiving near-unanimous critical praise, and selling an absolute shit-ton of copies. Egan’s 2022 follow-up novel The Candy House, which revisits some of the characters and their children, was also a bestseller and (despite garnering more mixed reviews than its predecessor) named among the best books of the the year by the New York Times, the Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, et cetera.
We Goon Squad die-hards have been waiting for this adaptation for over a decade—ever since HBO got the ball rolling two days after the 2011 Pulitzer announcement—and now, with the combined firepower of Wilde and A24 (coming off a controversy-boosted box office hit and an Oscars sweep, respectively), it looks like it might finally actually be happening.
[h/t Deadline]