‘Gatsby’ Police Procedural With Gender Twist In Works At NBC From Jake Coburn & Jason Tracey

EXCLUSIVE: NBC is eyeing a fresh spin on a literary classic, with a partially gender-swapped police procedural take on The Great Gatsby in development, Deadline has learned.

The series, titled Gatsby, hails from writer/EPs Jake Coburn and Jason Tracey and Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group.

It’s billed as a modern-day police procedural about Det. Jay Gatsby, a devilishly charming investigator with a con-man’s gift for reading human behavior, and decorated New York State Police Det. Nicole “Nicky” Carraway, who was born to be a cop but dreams of becoming a writer.

The gender-swapped character here is Nicky, a female counterpart to bond salesman Nick Carraway, who as neighbor to enigmatic self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby, serves as narrator to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The book finds Nick moving to the fictional Long Island neighborhood of West Egg, where he becomes drawn into the world of Gatsby amid his efforts to rekindle a romance with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan.

Considered one of the ‘Great American Novels,’ Gatsby has been adapted for the screen on myriad occasions, dating back to a 1926 silent film from Herbert Brenon, though mostly for film. The most famous adaptations are a Francis Ford Coppola-penned Paramount version starring Robert Redford, Bruce Dern and Mia Farrow, which released in 1974, and Baz Luhrmann’s big-budget 2013 take for Warner Bros. starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan.

An NBC veteran who has worked on a number of their series, Coburn comes to Gatsby after serving as co-showrunner and executive producer of their procedural The Hunting Party, which ran for two seasons. Before that, he was co-creator and executive producer of their crime drama The Endgame, as well as executive producer on Barbarians (Netflix), Biohackers (Netflix) and Quantico (ABC). He began his TV writing career on ABC’s Dirty Sexy Money before segueing to Gossip Girl, where he rose to the level of supervising producer. He has also written for the Arrow and Dynasty and, in addition to writing TV, has published two award-winning teen novels. He is repped by UTA and Brecheen Feldman Breimer.

Tracey most recently served as an executive producer on the ABC series RJ Decker. Prior to that, he was the creator and showrunner of CBS’ CSI: Vegas, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, where he was under an overall deal. His pilot Alive, starring Ryan Phillippe, was also produced for CBS. An executive producer on Elementary for all seven seasons, he worked earlier in his career on Burn Notice, Justice and Cold Case. He is repped by CAA, Lit Entertainment Group and Jacobson Teller Hoberman.