Back in 2019, not long after the final episode of Game of Thrones aired on HBO, creators and showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss signed a development deal with Netflix worth $200 million. For their very first project, they directed a comedy special from Saturday Night Live’s Leslie Jones, something far smaller and more intimate than what they did during their time in Westeros. Their next project is small in scale, as well: a university-set dramady called The Chair, starring Sandra Oh as a woman who gets a new job as the chair of the English department at a prominent university.
The official synopsis is below:
"The Chair follows Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh) as she navigates her new role as the Chair of the English department at prestigious Pembroke University. Ji-Yoon is faced with a unique set of challenges as the first woman to chair the department, and as one of the few staff members of color at the university."
Benioff and Weiss will serve as executive producers on the six-episode show, which drops on Netflix on August 28. Benioff’s wife Amanda Peet is the writer and showrunner. The cast includes folks like Jay Duplass, Nana Mensah and Bob Balaban.
The release date announcement also came with a fun little mock-up article from the Pembroke Daily, the student newspaper from the fictional university:
Looks like things are off to a whimsical start.
I like how low-stakes the show seems: it’s a six-episode university drama that will be much more about interpersonal relationships than dragons and battles or whatnot. Oh is a solid comedic talent, so I’ll probably sample this when it comes out.
What are Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss making for Netflix?
Benioff and Weiss have a couple other irons in the Netflix fire. They’re teaming Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello on Metal Lords, another small-scale project. They’re also adapting Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory, with Hugh Jackman already signed on as one of the stars.
But Benioff and Weiss do have another Game of Thrones-sized project in their sites: an adaptation of Liu Cixin’s wildly popular science fiction epic The Three-Body Problem. Last we checked, Netflix was still planning to go ahead with it, although it did suffer through a controversy when a number of Republican senators sent a letter to the streaming service objecting to the show on the grounds that Cixin has made comments in support of China’s internment of Uyghur Muslims. We haven’t heard anything about The Three-Body Problem for a while, so it’s unclear if Netflix is reassessing or moving forward.
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h/t Collider