Law & Order is on of NBC’s most beloved series and their latest show feels like a perfect replacement for the procedural. In January of 2021, F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s novel The Great Gatsbyentered into the public domain. Since, it has resulted in musical adaptations and more all based on Fitzgerald’s most famous work. Now, a new kind of adaptation is heading to network television. Gatsby, created by writer/EPs Jake Coburn and Jason Tracey, is in the works at NBC and is taking the world of Jay Gatsby and his narrator best friend, Nick Carraway, to an entirely new place: A modern day police station. The new police procedural will put Gatsby in the detective chair and use his con-man ways to help him solve cases with his partner, Det. Nicole “Nicky” Carraway. There is no news on casting or when the series is set to release at this time.
Nicky Carraway is a gender-swapped version of Nick, who is the cousin of Gatsby’s love interest Daisy Buchanan. Previous versions of Nick have included Sam Waterson in the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby that starred Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby, Tobey Maguire in Baz Luhrmann‘s 2013 film, and Paul Ruddin the 2000 A&E TV movie version. Whether the show will be set in New York’s Long Island as Fitzgerald’s book is is still unknown.
In the novel, Gatsby is a con-man who convinced people he was high society by throwing lavish parties to try and lure his love, Daisy, to his home. The narrator of the novel, Nick, is Daisy’s cousin and ends up living next to Gatsby for the summer. The two strike up an unlikely friendship and it leads to Nick playing a major part in Gatsby’s reconnection with Daisy and the turmoil of their one summer all together on Long Island. There is no real connection to a police setting or a detective story in Fitzgerald’s novel so it will be a new type of twist thanks to Coburn and Tracey.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Detective Should Solve Your Case? Columbo · Benoit Blanc · Jessica Fletcher · Marlowe
Answer eight quick questions and we will tell you who should be assigned to your murder. Four of the most famous detectives ever put on screen, and four completely different ways of getting somebody to admit what they did.
🕵Columbo(Columbo)
🧣Benoit Blanc(Knives Out)
🖨Jessica Fletcher(Murder, She Wrote)
🚬Philip Marlowe(The Big Sleep)
01
What do people assume about you when they meet you? Pick the one that sounds most like you.
02
Pick a coat. No wrong answers here.
03
How do you get information out of people? One answer only.
04
How would your friends describe you? Be honest.
05
Pick a drink. Pick the closest answer.
06
Where do you do your best thinking? Pick the closest answer.
07
What is your car like? Think about the one on your drive.
08
What makes you good at reading people? Last one. This is the one that decides it.
The Case Is Assigned Your Detective Is…
A great detective is really just a personality with a method attached,
which is why we keep remaking the same four of them. Here is yours, what it says about you, and the
case for them being the best in the business.
Peter Falk · Columbo · 1968 to 2003
Columbo
You let people think you are not a threat and then you simply
never go away. Columbo is the only major detective show that tells you who did it in the
first ten minutes, because the pleasure was never the puzzle, it was watching a rich man
slowly realise he is in trouble.
You are underestimated constantly, and you have stopped minding because it keeps
working.
The show invented the inverted detective format for television and nobody has bettered
it since.
Peter Falk won four Emmys for the part and played him across five decades.
Your flaw is that one more question is rarely one more question.
Daniel Craig · Knives Out · 2019 to now
Benoit Blanc
You are the most interesting person in the room and you know
exactly how to use it. Rian Johnson built Blanc as a gentleman detective who is also an
outsider everywhere he goes, which lets him be charming at people who would never otherwise
talk to him.
You read a room in seconds and you are not above performing a little to speed things up.
Rian Johnson was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Knives Out in
2020.
Wake Up Dead Man arrived on Netflix in December, making three Blanc films in six years.
Your risk is enjoying the performance so much that people stop taking the point
seriously.
Angela Lansbury · Murder, She Wrote · 1984 to 1996
Jessica Fletcher
Everybody tells you everything, and you have never once asked
them to. Jessica Fletcher is a crime novelist from a small town in Maine who is so warm and
so obviously trustworthy that suspects confess to her essentially as a social courtesy.
You are the person friends call first, and you have a frankly alarming amount of
information about everybody.
Angela Lansbury was nominated for the Emmy twelve times for this role and never won
once.
The show ran twelve seasons, and Jamie Lee Curtis is now bringing the character back.
Your flaw is that being told everything is only a gift if you know what to do with it.
Raymond Chandler · The Big Sleep · 1939
Philip Marlowe
You expect to be lied to and you are almost never disappointed.
Chandler wrote Marlowe as a man with a rigid private code in a city that has none, which is
why he takes the case, solves it, gets nothing out of it and takes the next one.
You are the most cynical person your friends know and the one they would call at four in
the morning.
Bogart played him in The Big Sleep in 1946 and the plot is famously impossible to
follow, which matters not at all.
Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum and Liam Neeson have all taken the part, and every version
says something about its decade.
Your weakness is a code so strict that it mostly punishes the person holding it.
This Isn’t the First Gender-Swapped Classic
Lucy Liu and Jonny Lee Miller in ‘Elementary’Image via CBS
Gatsby isn’t the first time a network series has taken a classic piece of literature and added a gender-swapped twist. Famously, the CBS series Elementaryput Joan H. Watson (Lucy Liu) at the side of Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) and explored the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle series by putting Joan and Sherlock in a procedural, much like Gatsby is planning on doing. Whether that means that there is going to be a love story between Nicky and Jay or play it safe like Elementary did with Joan and Sherlock, we don’t know. Until we know more though, it is going to be interesting to see how the themes of Gatsby work in this format.
You can watch Law & Order to get your procedural fix.
Release Date
September 13, 1990
Showrunner
Rick Eid
Directors
Constantine Makris, Edwin Sherin, Jace Alexander, David Platt, Matthew Penn, Martha Mitchell, Don Scardino, Christopher Misiano, Jean de Segonzac, Michael Pressman, Daniel Sackheim, Alex Chapple, Fred Berner, Fred Gerber, Gloria Muzio, James Frawley, Jim McKay, Vincent Misiano, Michael W. Watkins, Vern Gillum, Alex Hall, Dann Florek, Darnell Martin, David Grossman
Writers
René Balcer, Matt Witten, David Slack, Aaron Zelman, David Wilcox, Morgan Gendel, Pamela J. Wechsler, Lynne E. Litt, Marc Guggenheim, Stephanie Sengupta, Scott Gold, Walon Green, Gerry Conway, Sean Jablonski, Nick Santora, Chris Levinson, Christine Roum, Gordon Rayfield, Hall Powell, Keith Eisner, Julie Martin, Gia Gordon, Joe Gannon, Jonathan Collier
