Netflix harvests Andrew Scott's Talented Mr. Ripley show from Showtime's carcass

Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is one of crime literature’s great opportunist: A practiced con man and manipulator with a near-inhuman talent for sensing the weaknesses of others, and then exploiting them for his own gain. We can only hope he’d be mildly impressed by Netflix today, then, which appears to have stopped by to watch Showtime be absorbed into the fleshy bulk of streaming service Paramount+, and paused to briefly pluck Andrew Scott’s long-in-the-works Ripley show from its still-screaming carcass.

This is per THR, which reports that the Scott series—which will see the Fleabag Attractive Deacon take on the role of Ripley, previously played by the likes of Matt Damon and John Malkovich in film—will now air on Netflix, rather than its original cable home. The Ripley series was originally announced back in 2019—although noise about its development has been kicking around since at least 2015—and was set to get an 8-episode first season at Showtime. Veteran screenwriter and director Steven Zailian (most recently of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman) is set to serve as a showrunner on the series. From the casting—which includes Johnny Flynn as Ripley’s first major mark, Dickie Greenleaf, and Dakota Fanning as Dickie’s girlfriend friend Marge—it sounds like the show will at least start with with The Talented Mr. Ripley, and not at a later point in Ripley’s career of idle rich guy living, art forgery, and occasional murder.

Paramount announced late last month that it was folding Showtime into the Paramount+ corpus, essentially ending the network’s 40-plus year run as a somewhat independent entity. The network/service (because what’s the difference anymore?) pretty much immediately started shuffling shows around or canceling them as soon as the news broke.