Last January it was announced Woody Allen and Amazon Studios had agreed to write and direct a television series for the streaming site. The episodes would be half an hour long and it was expected to arrive this year. What was it going to be? At the time of the announcement Allen said, “I don’t know how I got into this. I have no ideas and I’m not sure where to begin. My guess is that Roy Price will regret this.” It seems not much has changed since then.
In a Q&A over at Deadline, Allen, who is in Cannes right now with his latest film, Irrational Man said he has “regretted every second” since agreeing to the deal, though he clearly hopes to put something worthwhile together:
“I have regretted every second since I said OK. It’s been so hard for me. I had the cocky confidence, well, I’ll do it like I do a movie…it’ll be a movie in six parts. Turns out, it’s not. For me, it has been very, very difficult. I’ve been struggling and struggling and struggling. I only hope that when I finally do it — I have until the end of 2016 — they’re not crushed with disappointment because they’re nice people and I don’t want to disappoint them. I am doing my best. I fit it in between films, so it’s not like, no film this year, I’m doing Amazon. It’s a job within my usual schedule. But I am not as good at it as I fantasized I might be. It’s not a piece of cake; it’s a tough thing and I’m earning every penny that they’re giving me and I just hope that they don’t feel, ‘My God, we gave him a very substantial amount of money and freedom and this is what he gives us?'”
It gets even more interesting than that when Allen admits to not even knowing what a streaming service is:
“I don’t even know what a streaming service is; that’s the interesting thing. When you said streaming service, it was the first time I’ve heard that term connected with the Amazon thing. I never knew what Amazon was. I’ve never seen any of those series, even on cable. I’ve never seen ‘The Sopranos’, or ‘Mad Men’. I’m out every night and when I come home, I watch the end of the baseball or basketball game, and there’s Charlie Rose and I go to sleep. Amazon kept coming to me and saying, please do this, whatever you want. I kept saying I have no ideas for it, that I never watch television. I don’t know the first thing about it. Well, this went on for a year and a half, and they kept making a better deal and a better deal.”
Obviously a better deal arrived and his response to Amazon’s begging and his ultimately agreeing is actually rather exciting for any fan of Allen’s work:
“Finally they said look, we’ll do anything that you want, just give us six half hours. They can be black and white, they can take place in Paris, in New York and California, they can be about a family, they can be comedy, you can be in them, they can be tragic. We don’t have to know anything, just come in with six half hours. And they offered a lot of money and everybody around me was pressuring me, go ahead and do it, what do you have to lose?”
So we can expect about three hours of programming by the end of 2016. It might be black-and-white (perfect). It might be set in Paris (great!), New York (Okay!) and California (eh, enough with the Californians). It might be a drama, comedy, tragedy, he might be in them. Who cares? It all sounds great to me. Maybe this could turn into Allen’s 8 1/2 and be a series about him trying to create a television series without any idea what the hell he’s going to do. That should fit right in with his typical insecurities.
I guess we’ll know soon enough.
