It’s been almost a year since the much-talked-about but highly fraught resurrection of gawker.com went kaput. Bustle Digital Group, which snatched up the domain in a 2018 bankruptcy auction, said at the time that it was postponing its plans to reboot the legendary website, following the P.R. fallout from a messy personnel controversy. Given the state of the media business—BDG is among the many players that have reckoned with coronavirus cuts—it’s unlikely we’ll see it happen anytime soon.
Plans for a revival of another sort, however, are moving along. Apple TV+, now building up its arsenal in the streaming wars, is in the early stages of developing a series about Gawker, several people familiar with the project told me. The show was conceived and pitched by two former Gawker staffers, Max Read and Cord Jefferson, who have been working on scripts for the past couple of months with a writers room that apparently includes some other Gawker alumni. Read was Gawker’s editor in chief at one point, but stepped down in 2015 amid a controversy related to a post about an executive at Condé Nast (which owns Vanity Fair). He then landed at New York magazine, but resigned recently to concentrate on the show. Jefferson is a former Gawker writer and editor who went on to work in TV, where he has racked up credits on shows including Watchmen, Succession, and Master of None.
Jefferson and Read declined to comment, so details are scant. But the series was described to me as a dramedy about Gawker’s ascent and its impact on the media landscape, as it transformed from an insidery gossip blog into a major force in the type of journalism that skewers celebrities and the powerful. Skewering power, of course, is ultimately what brought about the demise of the website’s parent company, Gawker Media, which was sued into oblivion by Hulk Hogan, with help from Peter Thiel.
The Gawker series isn’t the first media- or journalism-centric plot to enter Apple’s growing suite of original programming, which is competing with the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+. The company’s lineup also includes The Morning Show, inspired by Brian Stelter’s book about morning TV, and Home Before Dark, based on the real-life story of adolescent reporter Hilde Lysiak, whom I profiled in 2015. Apple declined to comment.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— Inside Donald Trump and Jared Kushner’s Two Months of Coronavirus Magical Thinking
— The Trump Family Aims to Take Down Fox While Building Ties to a More Loyal Network
— How Andrew Cuomo Became the Coronavirus Trump Antidote
— In Blistering Whistleblower Complaint, Rick Bright Blasts Team Trump’s COVID-19 Response
— How Trump Gutted Obama’s Pandemic Preparedness Systems
— Advice for Biden in Chris Matthews’s First Interview Since His Hardball Exit
— From the Archive: Revisiting Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner’s Battle to Control the Future of 24-Hour News
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.