Photo: PHOTOGRAPHED BY JESSICA NASH.
Ashley Madison is taking over Hollywood. The online purveyor of extra-marital affairs announced that it's in the midst of developing a show about — you guessed it — cheating.
“It used to be that if it bleeds, it leads, but I think now if it cheats, it leads,” said Ashley Madison's CEO, Noel Biderman.
Take one look at television's current landscape, and it's clear that Mr. Biderman has a point. Almost all of TV's most acclaimed dramas — Scandal, The Leftovers, Mad Men — feature adults behaving badly in the bedroom.
The new series won't mark the first time Ashley Madison has received the Hollywood treatment. In Jason Reitman's upcoming film Men, Women & Children, Adam Sandler and Rosemarie DeWitt play a couple whose marriage is tested when one of them decides to explore the site's lurid offerings.
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According to Biderman, the new series will follow Reitman's lead by also mining the stories of regular people. "This is about your best friend. This is your neighbor, this is your school teacher," he said.
But, what would a show about adultery be without the inclusion of some high-powered figures and the sex scandals that so often derail their careers? Don't worry, says Biderman, there'll be plenty of that too. "We’d all liked to have been a fly on the wall as Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton fooled around in the Oval Office," he said. "We’d all loved to have been there when Tiger Woods bedded mistress after mistress.”
Um...OK.
There's no word yet on when, where (or if) the series will air, but there's just something about a show based on an online hookup website that just screams Spike TV, isn't there? (The Hollywood Reporter)