Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh’s beloved 1964 children’s novel, will provide the basis for an upcoming animated series on subscription streaming service Apple TV+, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Booksmart’s Beanie Feldstein will provide the voice of 11-year-old Harriet; Golden Globe and Emmy winner Jane Lynch will perform Harriet’s nanny, Ole Golly; and frequent Hallmark film star Lacey Chabert will co-star as Marion Hawthorne, Harriet’s classmate and main antagonist. No premiere date was announced at this early stage.
1The original novel, which received a Kirkus Star, tells the story of young Harriet M. Welsch, who lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She hopes to be a professional writer one day, and she methodically writes down her observations and opinions about her classmates and others in her neighborhood. She sees little of her parents, and becomes upset when her nanny and confidante, known as Ole Golly, gets engaged to be married. Then she loses her notebook, and when it’s found, her often unfriendly comments about her friends and fellow students are revealed, making her new enemies.
Fitzhugh wrote two sequels before her death in 1974 at the age of 46: The Long Secret (1965) and Sport, which was posthumously published in 1979. A 1996 live-action feature film of Harriet the Spy starred Michelle Trachtenberg, later of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as Harriet and Rosie O’Donnell as Ole Golly. Another, very loose live-action adaptation, Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars, aired on the Disney Channel in 2010, featuring Wizards of Waverly Place’s Jennifer Stone as the main character.
Will McRobb, who co-created the well-regarded 1990s live-action Nickelodeon kids’ show The Adventures of Pete and Pete, will write and executive-produce the new series, which will be co-produced by The Jim Henson Company.
Feldstein recently starred in another, very different book-to-screen adaptation: How to Build a Girl, based on Caitlin Moran’s Kirkus-starred 2014 novel, which premiered on video-on-demand on May 8.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
