Now I’m not saying I’m not a fan of Adam Brody and Chloe Sevigny, but I don’t like seeing their names as the leads of Whit Stillman‘s upcoming Amazon pilot “The Cosmopolitans“. It’s just casting that’s too on-the-nose given the show’s plot — a group of young American expatriates in Paris who are searching for love and friendship in a foreign city.
As much as I love the synopsis for a Stillman venture, with these two in the lead I can almost hear the whiny, “witty”, back-and-forth banter now, increasingly grating with every punchline and sip of espresso. It’s like when Larry David starred in Woody Allen‘s Whatever Works (my review), the writing was on point, but the actor delivering it just seemed a little too perfect for the part. It doesn’t make it necessarily bad, but just not as good as it could have been.
Both Brody and Sevigny are Stillman veterans, he starring in the excellent The Last Days of Disco, and maybe I’m jumping the gun, but having seen all of Stillman’s work I feel I can tell where this is going to end up.
In addition to Brody and Sevigny, the show will also star Dree Hemingway, Shaun Evans, Adriano Giannini and Carrie MacLemore.
Filming begins in Paris in two weeks and while I’m intrigued by a new Stillman project, I’m extremely wary of this casting as I fear it will seem just the right fit for a couple episodes but get more and more repetitive as the show wears on.
