The controversial Australian novel, The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, (Penguin, 2010), may become an NBC eight-episode series. Lisa Cholodenko has signed on to direct. As The Guardian comments, “This is ideal ground for Cholodenko [The Kids Are All Right, and the HBO series, Olive Kitteridge, now shooting ] whose films explore the tensions, hypocrisies and foibles of liberal middle-class life,”

A hit in both Australia and the U.K., where it became a reading group staple, the novel is about the shock waves set off after a man slaps someone else’s 3-year-old at a barbecue. The author told The Guardian in January, “I wanted to write about complacency, the fact that Australia at the turn of the century had become one of the wealthiest and most prosperous nations on the planet. We had become richer, we had become fatter, but it also seemed that we had become less generous and less egalitarian because of this prosperity.” The same could be said of the U.S.

Below is the trailer for the Australian version:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2014 at 6:02 am and is filed under Books & TV, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.