Foer’s family drama
IN JANUARY 2012 THERE WAS A FLURRY OF ARTICLES ON A NEW COMEDY in development at HBO called All Talk. The show was about a Jewish family in Washington, D.C., and the tone would be, according to a quote in Deadline Hollywood, “politically, religiously, culturally, intellectually and sexually irreverent.” Ben Stiller would star and direct; Scott Rudin would produce. All Talk was written and created by Jonathan Safran Foer.
It might’ve been a great show, but we’ll never know, because at the last possible minute Foer killed it. “Two years writing it, and it got greenlit, and we were just a month or two from shooting, it was cast, it was ready to go,” Foer tells me over coffee in Brooklyn recently. “And I had a kind of nervous breakdown, almost. I don’t want to be a showrunner. That’s not how I want to live my life. Which begs the question, How do I want to live my life? It was after that that I really went into high gear on this book.” By this book
