Netflix & ‘Adolescence’ Director Philip Barantini Developing Small Screen Version Of Buzzy Edinburgh Fringe Play ‘Eat The Rich’
EXCLUSIVE: Netflix and Adolescence director Philip Barantini‘s indie are in talks to turn Jade Franks’ buzzy Edinburgh play Eat the Rich (But Maybe Not Me Mates X) into a TV series.
Inspired by Franks’s life as a working-class student at Cambridge, the play was a huge hit at the Fringe Festival this past August, leading to a frenzy of interest from streamers and networks. Multiple sources say Netflix won a bidding war and is now beginning early stage development.
Deadline can also reveal that Netflix has struck a development deal with Barantini’s It’s All Made Up Productions, which the in-demand Barantini runs with Boiling Point exec Samantha Beddoe. A Netflix spokeswoman told us the streamer is “picking up the rights to Eat the Rich in connection to our development deal with Its All Made Up Productions.”
We understand Franks plans to adapt the play herself, similar to how Richard Gadd transferred his one-man play into Netflix hit Baby Reindeer. Franks and her agent at Independent Talent Group had been meeting with producers in the UK and U.S., we are told. The adaptation is in early development and is not guaranteed to make it to screen.
Eat the Rich (But Maybe Not Me Mates X) is inspired by Franks’s life as a working-class student at Cambridge. It follows Jade, a first-year university student from Liverpool in the north of England who juggles secret cleaning shifts with the culture shock of Oxbridge privilege.
The play, which comes from JFR Productions and director Tatenda Shamiso, has been praised for its exploration of the absurdities of class, money and belonging in the UK. It won The Scotsman’s Fringe First Award, The Holden Street Theatres Award and The Filipa Bragança Award, and will soon begin a short run at the Soho Theatre in London.
It’s All Made Up, which is backed by Avalon, has a development deal with Netflix and is also making Hell Jumper for the streamer, a feature adaptation of the award-winning BBC documentary.
If Eat the Rich makes it to screen, it will follow in a line of Netflix shows adapted from plays that made a splash at Edinburgh.
Baby Reindeer was one of the streamer’s most popular shows of 2024, having an outsized impact on the zeitgeist. Deadline then revealed that Netflix had scouted out Brian Watkins and Julia McDermott’s Weather Girl, an apocalyptic one-woman play about a Californian weather girl in meltdown that staged sold out shows to rave reviews at Edinburgh. That show was recently confirmed with A24 and Robert Downey Jr’s Team Downey. Eat the Rich will of course also draw comparisons to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, which ushered in the era of the buzzy one-person play and was adapted for TV by the BBC and Amazon.
