Jason Bateman To Star In, Direct 8-Episode Series Adaptation Of Esquire Article ‘Daddy Ball’ As Netflix, Aggregate Win Bidding Battle
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
EXCLUSIVE: Netflix and Aggregate prevailed in a bidding war to secure rights to writer David Gauvey Herbert’s 2021 Esquire magazine article “Daddy Ball.” They will find a new title, but the source material will be developed as an eight-episode limited series that Ozark‘s Jason Bateman will both star in and direct. Bateman, Michael Costigan and Roxie Rodriguez will be co-executive producers for Aggregate. David Herbert and David Klawans will also EP the dark comedy limited series.
There were eight offers on the table, but Netflix won it in an outright buy for an undisclosed number commensurate with the demand. It will be developed on a fast track.
More from Deadline
The article starts the way most dad-on-dad youth-sports rivalries do. But on the Long Island Inferno, two fathers, both with complicated pasts, took it all too far. There were claims of stalking, corrupt cops and mob connections. Neither man was ever the same.
Determined not to follow in his detached father’s footsteps, Bobby Sanfilippo found himself doing quite the opposite with his son. He became entangled in an epic travel baseball dad-on-dad rivalry with a man named John Reardon that led tabloids to call him “a Suffolk County Steinbrenner,” “seriously sick,” and one of the worst dads in youth-sports history. It starts in the world of Little League baseball and expands into a Beef-like war between two smalltime criminal fathers. Both Sanfilippo and Reardon have rap sheets of their own, but what went down in the summer of 2012 at Baseball Heaven will define them and their families forever. Stalking claims, threatening text messages, and an unwarranted arrest later at the heart of it all, it’s a story about the lengths fathers will go for their sons.
Herbert wrote “The Ballad of Ron & Dorinda” for Esquire, which is currently set up at MRC with Jessie Nickson-Lopez adapting; Boss of the Beach for New York Magazine, currently in development at Searchlight TV with Darren Aronofsky; and Camp Shane at ABC Signature with Josh Gad’s Angry Child producing.
CAA, Lighthouse Management + Media, and attorney Tom Hoberman rep Bateman and Aggregate. Herbert is UTA, which brokered the deal.
Best of Deadline
Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
