Gail Berman's Jackal Group Sells Comedies 'The Folks' & 'To Whom It May Concern' To CBS
By Denise Petski via Deadline on October 24, 2018
Gail Berman’s The Jackal Group has sold two comedies to CBS – multi-cam The Folks with former Scandal star Kerry Washington’s Simpson Street producing, and hybrid To Whom It May Concern. CBS Television Studios is the studio for both projects.
Written by Frank Pines, The Folks centers on what happens when a momma’s boy marries a daddy’s girl, and their respective parents can’t let go.
Pines executive produces with Jackal Group’s Berman and Joe Earley. Washington and Pilar Savone executive produce for Simpson Street.
The project re-teams Pines, Jackal Group and Simpson Street, who worked together on Man Of the House, a multi-camera hybrid family comedy created by Pines which sold last development season to ABC as part of Simpson Street’s deal with ABC Studios.
Written by Mike Metz, To Whom It May Concern centers on Evan, who sets out with his group of 20-something friends to accomplish a list of challenges he wrote for himself years ago in an effort to turn around his banal life.
Berman and Earley executive produce via Jackal Group. Metz is co-executive producer.
Simpson’ Street is currently in development on Goldie Vance, a family film franchise for Fox, directed by Rashida Jones, as well as the films City of Saints & Thieves with Will Packer Productions, The Mothers with Warner Bros, The Perfect Mother with Pascal Pictures, and 24-7 with UnbeliEVAble Entertainment and Universal Pictures. This past summer, their original scripted drama web series Five Points, a co-production with Indigenous Studios, premiered on Facebook Watch. Washington executive produced Simpson’s Street first project, the Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG-nominated HBO film Confirmation, in which she also starred.
The Jackal Group is currently producing unscripted series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo for Netflix. Its scripted television projects in development include adaptations of Ricardo Nuila’s anticipated non-fiction book The Poor Unfortunates and Chloe Benjamin’s New York Times bestselling novel The Immortalists; dramas Move and Paradise Cove as well as comedy, An American Band, set up at Fox.
For Broadway, The Jackal Group is producing a contemporary musical based on the film, The Rose. On the feature side the company recently announced plans to produce the official biopic of legendary comedian, George Carlin, to be penned by Oscar-nominated Moneyball writer Stan Chervin and is also developing I Almost Forgot About You, a feature adaptation of Terry McMillan’s bestselling novel starring Academy Award winner Viola Davis, directed by Malcolm D. Lee and co-written by McMillan and Oscar winner Ron Bass, at Universal Pictures; and The Addams Family, MGM’s animated feature based on the macabre clan, directed by Conrad Vernon and voiced by Oscar Issac, Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz, Finn Wolfhard, Nick Kroll, Bette Midler and Allison Janney, which will be released October 18, 2019.