- Woody Allen
- Getty Images
In the great migration of film stars to television, Amazon has lured a trophy talent. Woody Allen has signed a deal with Amazon Studios to create his first TV series. The influential and Oscar-winning filmmaker will write and direct a half-hour comedy. The show is expected to debut next year, but details about the premise and cast of the untitled series are still unknown—even to Allen, apparently.
“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,” Allen said in a statement, referring to the vice president of Amazon Studios.
The announcement comes two days after Amazon snagged the first major award for its original programming. At the Golden Globes, “Transparent” and star Jeffery Tambor won best television series and best actor in the comedy category.
The studio ordered a full season of Allen’s series, which means that the 79-year-old director doesn’t have to go through Amazon’s typical pilot process for original programs. Usually Amazon users are allowed to rank and review a trial episode of a new show, a factor that studio executives weigh when deciding whether to pick up a full season.
That Allen signed with the streaming TV company instead of, say, a broadcast network, makes some sense because of Amazon’s reputation for offering established producers lots of creative autonomy. Still, his partnership with a technology company is somewhat ironic, given his old-school habits. He’s known for writing scripts in longhand and claimed in a 2012 interview with The Wall Street Journal that he had never sent or received an email, and that he mostly used his iPhone for listening to jazz recordings.
The influence of auteur writers and producers plays a major part in the effort by new TV distributors to draw viewers and (in the case Amazon and Netflix) paid subscribers. For instance, the imprimatur of respected director David Fincher helped draw attention to “House of Cards,” the first Netflix original series to receive critical acclaim and awards. Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh is among the creators of “Red Oaks,” one of five original series that Amazon plans to launch this year.
Allen has written for television before—he worked on the ground floor of network comedy as a writer for “The Sid Caesar Show”—but the Amazon project will be his first series created for TV.
“Woody Allen is a visionary creator who has made some of the greatest films of all-time, and it’s an honor to be working with him on his first television series,” said Price in the statement. “From ‘Annie Hall’ to ‘Blue Jasmine,’ Woody has been at the creative forefront of American cinema and we couldn’t be more excited to premiere his first TV series exclusively on Prime Instant Video next year.”
The series will be available to Prime customers in the U.S., U.K. and Germany.
For the latest entertainment news Follow @WSJSpeakeasy