Is there anything more nerve-wracking for a restaurant owner than having a snooty restaurant critic stop by? How about a 9-year-old critic who shows up with his alcoholic mother? This is the premise behind Bream Gives Me the Hiccups, a series of short stories written by actor Jesse Eisenberg that will be adapted into a half-hour comedy for Amazon, reports The Hollywood Reporter.
Eisenberg, perhaps best known for his lead role in The Social Network (for which he was nominated for an Oscar), writes these stories for publishing house McSweeney’s. He has reportedly written the script for the Amazon series, and has signed on to serve as executive producer and director.
The show, as noted, follows the child, described as both precocious and privileged, who visits various establishments, chows down with his mom, then reviews the experience in his blog. To give you an idea, in the latest entry of the written series, The Ashram and Mom, the fictional boy begins by describing his experience going to an ashram with his mom, which he refers to as a place where “stressed out people go when they’re rich.” Once he delves into the food review, his age shines through. He declares it “disgusting” because it was vegetarian, but not the “good kind of vegetarian, the bad kind where they put so much spice on everything to try to make you forget that it’s not meat.” The hilarity continues when he discusses the fork made of a carrot cut into the shape of the fork (to avoid wastage, of course), and the seaweed bowl that tasted like “when you accidentally swallow dirty water.”
It’s not hard to see how the experiences described in the stories and the sheer humour of the “reviews” may easily lend themselves to an on screen setup. But it will rely heavily on finding the right actors to play the child and the clearly unhappy mom who drowns her sorrows in the bottle and by visiting places she has no business being (but all the money to afford) like ashrams.
Amazon is pouring it on thick with the new original series. Are you excited for this one?
