The latest (and youngest) director to win an Academy Award is following suit with hundreds of other filmmakers and actors; he’s going online and he’s doing it with Netflix. La La Land’s Damien Chazelle can literally pick up any project he wanted to with his recent successes. His next move may be an interesting one, but he’s not completely breaking from his winning grind.
The upcoming project, The Eddy, is going to be a musical drama television series set in modern day Paris. The eight-episode series will revolve around a nightclub and everything that’s involved in it. With the location’s diversity, we’re expecting dialogue in English, French, and Arabic. We’re also expecting the musical, physical, and emotional dynamic among the characters to be slightly more upbeat and romantic than Chazelle’s last movie. They’ll be in Paris, after all. With Jack Thorne writing out the series and Glen Ballard producing all the music, it’s really difficult to imagine it another way.
We can expect the show to highlight some of Paris’ best locations; it’ll actually be smart to do so. There’s music and culture everywhere in the City of Lights, and we can almost imagine the characters even though we currently don’t have the official cast just yet. But we’re sure we’ll be getting to know the house band and club owner closely; we’ll be learning about how their lives intertwine across the River Seine. We can imagine there’ll be as many loves and heartbreaks as there are bridges in the city, and we know Chazelle will make it a point that we feel it all too. The talented actor is slated to direct the first two episodes, but he’ll be executive producing the entire series. We expect to see Chazelle come back towards the end of the series to direct again, but with nothing else to go by, we can’t be entirely sure.
For now, all we know is that Netflix has made a smart move, not only with partnering with such a talented director and producer but also with shooting on location in Paris. It only makes sense for the company to appeal to its international audience even more. We know they’ve been relentlessly going for higher-profile filmmakers and actors, and they seem to have no trouble getting this done. So far, Netflix have partnered with the Coen brothers, Martin Scorsese, Ava DuVernay, Shonda Rimes, and now, Daniel Chazelle.
This isn’t the first time Netflix is doing a musical series, though. The Get Down, a Baz Luhrmann project, was a musical series about the birth of hip-hop in 1970s New York. It failed tremendously and at a cost of roughly $120 million. The show was canceled after one season. While we might have higher expectations this time around with The Eddy, we’re not getting our hopes too high at least until we’ve seen Chazelle’s first couple of episodes.
There’s no further information as to when The Eddy will be released or when production will begin. Be sure to keep an eye out also for cast information as it comes about.
