A24 Shops Jesse Eisenberg’s First TV Series After Rice’s Netflix Move

A24 will take Jesse Eisenberg’s first television series as a writer, director, and producer to buyers in the coming weeks. The untitled show is based on his own short fiction, and Peter Rice, who developed it under an A24 deal, is credited as an executive producer. Rice was named Netflix’s chief content officer on October 15, 2026, three days before the shop became public, which puts the most likely bidder in the room and the person who built the series on the sideline.

Eisenberg is coming off the festival run of The Debut, his third film as a writer-director. He has described the series as a campus story set in the fall of 2002. No title, no cast, and no streamer have been announced.

Buyers Will See the Series in the Coming Weeks

Eisenberg is writing the series, executive producing it, and is set to direct. A24 is expected to take it out in the coming weeks, which in this business means a packet goes to streamers and networks, not that a home is locked. The premise, according to people close to the project, follows a young woman whose new ideas and relationships challenge her beliefs.

That is a long way from a pickup. It is also the furthest a Jesse Eisenberg TV project has traveled since two earlier comedies stalled in development. Pairing him with A24 for a neurotic period piece is on-brand for a studio that already backed his first two features as a director, and it is still only a shopping trip.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The jobs: Eisenberg writes, executive produces, and is slated to direct the untitled A24 series.
• The producer: Rice is an executive producer under his A24 deal and is not expected to run the show day to day after his Netflix start.
• The setting: Eisenberg has said the story follows an 18-year-old freshman in the fall of 2002, in Indiana, across September, October, and November.
• The calendar: He said in September 2026 that he hoped to go in the spring.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The buyer: Netflix is expected to be in the mix because of Rice and because it already airs A24 series; no bid has been disclosed.
• The source story: It is not confirmed that the series adapts Harper Jablonski from Bream Gives Me Hiccups.
• The title and cast: Neither has been announced.

A shop this close to a festival closing night is how a film company turns heat into a meeting schedule. The meetings still have to end in a license.

October 26 Is Rice’s First Day at Netflix

Netflix said on October 15 that Rice would take over Netflix content on October 26, replacing Bela Bajaria, who left after nearly 10 years. He will oversee scripted and unscripted series, film, and live events across regions. Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO, called him one of the most effective at-scale operators in the business, with deep talent relationships across TV and film.

Rice’s last full-time job was chairman of Walt Disney Television, where he oversaw more than 300 shows and 4,000 hours a year, including The Bear, Abbott Elementary, and Shogun. Disney ousted him in June 2022. In the years after that, he produced films with Alex Garland, Danny Boyle, Chris Rock, Jason Reitman, and Aaron Sorkin at Sony and A24, and he held an A24 producing deal when this series was developed.

He is expected to keep an executive producer credit because he developed the show, and he is not expected to have hands-on involvement going forward. That split is not unheard of. Dan Lin, Netflix’s top film executive, has remained an EP on Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Ori Marmur has kept a credit on Prime Video’s The Boys franchise. The awkward part is the calendar. The packet is going out while Rice is still walking into the building that may have to bid on it.

THE WEEK THE SHOP AND THE JOB COLLIDED

1. October 15, 2026: Netflix names Rice chief content officer, effective October 26, as Bajaria exits.
2. October 18, 2026: A24’s plan to take Eisenberg’s series to buyers becomes public, and Eisenberg describes the show on the London Film Festival carpet.
3. October 26, 2026: Rice starts the Netflix job and, on this series, is expected to remain a credited producer rather than a hands-on boss.

Eisenberg had already tied Rice to the series months earlier. Speaking in July 2026 at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, he said he was writing an A24 series based on short stories he wrote five years ago, and that he was doing it with Rice, who was also producing Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning. Eisenberg declined to play Mark Zuckerberg again in that film. He kept the producer and moved the work to television.

An 18-Year-Old Freshman in Indiana, Fall 2002

On the London red carpet for The Debut on October 18, Eisenberg gave the cleanest account of the series he has offered in public. He wrote it for A24 and Rice. It follows an 18-year-old girl in the fall of 2002.

It’s about the beginning of the culture wars that we’re in now, but it’s not pretentious or overly political, or maybe it is pretentious. That’s for you to decide.

Jesse Eisenberg, on the London Film Festival red carpet

Jesse Eisenberg tells us details of his next project: A TV series following an 18-year-old girl in 2002.

“It’s about the beginning of the culture wars that we’re in now.” #BFILondonFilmFestival pic.twitter.com/eaXSVUXRTe

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) October 18, 2026

Around the Telluride premiere of The Debut in September 2026, he was more specific. The series is based on short stories he wrote. It takes place in September, October, and November of 2002 in Indiana. The lead is an 18-year-old freshman on campus, and he wants the period to echo the present. He hoped to go in the spring.

That description does not line up neatly with the Harper Jablonski guess that followed the shop news. Harper is the narrator of “Letters From a Frustrated Freshman” in Eisenberg’s 2015 collection of short stories, Bream Gives Me Hiccups. She writes angry letters to her old high-school guidance counselor, nicknames her roommate Slutnick, and spirals over stolen ramen. Eisenberg has said he built her from the way his sister sounded during freshman year at American University, and that the joke was to give ordinary campus rage a volume “not seen since, like, the Third Reich.”

Harper is a freshman. She is not an Indiana 2002 culture-wars story, and the book came out a decade before the “five years ago” dating he gave in July 2026. The new series may share a type, a young woman whose certainties crack in a dorm, without being that text. He is still writing comic letters for McSweeney’s, including a piece he logged at the Toronto festival as “Dear Suit That Hangs In My Closet,” so the short-fiction habit never left the film career. The series is the first time that habit has a real TV shop behind it.

Two Earlier Television Projects Never Reached Air

Calling this his first series as a writer, director, and producer is true as a show that exists. It is not true as a development history. He has already had two television comedies set up with serious partners, and neither reached air.

In January 2015, he took Bream Gives Me Hiccups to Amazon as a half-hour, written on spec from the McSweeney’s pieces about a 9-year-old restaurant critic. A24’s Ravi Nandan and John Hodges were attached to executive produce, and Eisenberg planned to direct. By May 2016 the same material had moved to Jax Media, the company behind Broad City and Inside Amy Schumer, with A24 still on the producing line. Parker Posey, Victor Rasuk, and newcomer Elliott Smith were cast. Filming was scheduled in New York that month. The series did not reach air.

In April 2017 he teamed with J.J. Abrams’s Bad Robot and Warner Bros. Television on The Market, a single-camera comedy he would write, direct, and star in. Recently widowed Harold Katzman moves to Pittsburgh to live with his adult son, Stan, played by Eisenberg. Both men lose their jobs and hit a brutal market. Abrams and Ben Stephenson were executive producers. No network attached, and the show did not proceed. The Katzman surname had already appeared in the Bream casting, another small sign of a writer circling the same family of neurotics.

EISENBERG’S TELEVISION PROJECTS

He has been on television as an actor. Fox’s Get Real in 1999 was an early regular role, and he later appeared in FX’s Fleishman Is in Trouble in 2022. The gap is behind the camera. For about two and a half decades the work that carried his name as a maker lived in features, plays, and short fiction, while the TV ideas waited in folders.

The Debut Opens December 11 After a Festival Run

What changed is the movies. A Real Pain, his 2024 feature for Searchlight, sent two cousins through Poland on a heritage trip. Kieran Culkin won the Oscar for supporting actor on March 2, 2025. Eisenberg was nominated for original screenplay and won that category at the BAFTAs on February 16, 2025. Critics gave the film a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with an 82% score from audiences. A stray description of that screenplay run as an Oscar win is wrong; the Academy nomination is the American prize, and the BAFTA is the win.

The Debut is the film A24 is selling now. It premiered at Telluride, played the New York Film Festival, and closed the BFI London Film Festival on October 18, 2026, the same day the series shop became public. Paul Giamatti, who plays the production’s director, was not in London because he had COVID. Julianne Moore stars as Mona Friedman, a shy New Jersey housewife who lands a bit part in a community-theater musical and wages war for the integrity of a tiny role. Halle Bailey is also in the cast, and Eisenberg appears in the film himself. The Tomatometer sat at 92% as the London screening landed. A24 opens The Debut on December 11 in the United States.

Moore, who also starred in his 2022 A24 debut When You Finish Saving the World, called the new script one of the best she had read in her life. Eisenberg told the London audience he loved the movie more than anything he has made, because it has music, absurdism, heart, and depressed people in funny situations. Fruit Tree, the company of Emma Stone, Dave McCary, and Ali Herting, produced, as it did on A Real Pain. A24 boarded the film in April 2025 as a worldwide negative pickup while cameras were rolling, with Bernadette Peters and Havana Rose Liu among the additions.

THE DEBUT, IN BRIEF

• The lead: Moore plays Mona Friedman, a neglected housewife who turns a bit part into a method-acting crusade.
• The antagonist: Giamatti plays Jerry, the domineering community-theater director.
• The date: U.S. theaters on December 11, 2026, after Telluride, NYFF, and London.
• The maker: Eisenberg’s third feature as writer-director, and a reunion with A24 after When You Finish Saving the World.

Awards-season traffic is a terrible time to start a television writer’s room and a useful time to take a packet out. Buyers who skipped Bream in 2016 are now taking meetings with the person who just closed a major festival with Julianne Moore.

Netflix Already Houses Beef and Two More A24 Dramas

Netflix is the obvious room because Rice is walking in, and because the company already has a working A24 pipeline. Beef is on the service, with a second season listed on A24’s own television slate. Also headed there, from the same studio relationship, are Trigger Point, with Joel Edgerton, and an untitled spy drama with Millie Bobby Brown and David Harbour. A bidder that already knows how to post an A24 title does not need a tutorial on the brand.

Whether that bidder can move cleanly on a series its new chief developed is a different problem. Rice’s job is to pick shows for a global slate. This one has his name on it as a producer who is not supposed to pick it. Other companies can read the same packet without that knot, which is why A24 taking it out to the market, rather than walking it down a hallway at Netflix, is the cleaner process even if Netflix still wins.

Eisenberg has been trying to put his short fiction on television since the Amazon Bream deal in 2015. The version that finally has a shop window is a 2002 Indiana freshman story, packaged by A24, carrying a producer who starts at Netflix on October 26 and is not meant to run the room. The film that made the meetings possible opens December 11. The series still needs a buyer who can live with all of that.