YES, MRS. FLETCHER
Kathryn Hahn As Tom Perrotta’s Protagonist
Tom Perrotta is no stranger to adaptations of his best-selling (and even his not so successful) novels. The author penned Election, The Leftovers, Little Children and now the HBO-produced Mrs. Fletcher. His presence loomed large in each writing room, except for Mrs. Fletcher. For that, he is the showrunner.
HBO’s latest comedic venture stars Kathryn Hahn, whose flair and talent is not recognized enough. Hahn is the protagonist of this dual coming-of-age story. When Eve Fletcher’s son departs for college, she has a sexual reawakening with its roots in porn. The single mom follows her own path of self discovery through online outlets. That path includes a kitchen floor (see the trailer above for more on that). The other coming-of-age storyline involves her son, Brendan Fletcher (Jackson White), who tries to use his high school moves on women in college.
Those who have read the New York Times best-seller Mrs. Fletcher should consider the book and series as two separate entities with their own stories to tell, Perrotta told IndieWire. He emphasized that making a film or series that is different from the novel is what’s fun about adaptations. He loves getting input from other people, which is why he hired four female directors and mostly female writers for the seven-episode series.
The show was already in production when the #MeToo Movement started. That really put the project into perspective for Perrotta. He took this newfound accountability and implemented it.
“As a novelist, I already had told this story, but now that we’re in a collaborative space, (hiring women) was something that was very much at the forefront of everybody’s mind: We need to have a lot of women’s voices involved with this, and we had four women directors, we had a writers’ room that was majority female,” Perrotta said. “We just tried at every stage to really make sure that this wasn’t just some middle-age guy saying, ‘These are the intimate experiences of a woman.’”
Kudos to you, Perrotta. Now we can’t wait to see how Mrs. Fletcher plays out.
