NBC Sets New The Great Gatsby Detective Series With 2 Major Story Twists

The Great Gatsby is getting the procedural treatment at NBC.

According to Deadline, the network is developing what’s described as a modern-day take on the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic that will focus on the character of Detective Nicole Carraway. That is, of course, a gender-swapped version of the protagonist Nick Carraway from the Fitzgerald novel.

The series, currently titled Gatsby, is a police procedural that’s focused on Detective Jay Gatsby, who is described as a charming investigator who also has a “con-man’s gift for reading human behavior.” It also puts the focus on Nicole “Nicky” Carraway, a fellow NYPD detective with dreams of being a writer. The project hails from Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group, with Jake Coburn and Jason Tracey as executive producers.

The Great Gatsby is counted among the greatest novels of all time. The story, published in 1925, introduces readers to

The gender-swapped character here is Nicky, a female counterpart to bond salesman Nick Carraway, the bond salesman who lives next to the self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby. Even though Nick is initially drawn into Gatsby’s vastly different world, he soon grows disillusioned by it. In one of the more famous moments in the novel, as perhaps the clearest sign of Nick’s changing sentiment, he tells Gatsby: “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

The book, which is taught in schools and has been translated into many languages, is also about Gatsby’s doomed feelings for Daisy Buchanan. That should be plenty of material ripe for exploring in an ongoing drama, with the series likely also expanding on Nicole’s shifting view of Gatsby and the world he inhabits. But given the police procedural constraints, it should be interesting to see which parts remain and which are excised in the long run.

In any case, the TV version of Gatsby is being spearheaded by a pair of network veterans. Coburn worked on NBC’s The Hunting Party, as well as ABC’s Quantico. His other credits include Arrow, Gossip Girl, and the reboot of Dynasty. Tracey, meanwhile, is an executive producer of the Scott Speedman-led detective series R.J. Decker. He was the showrunner on CSI: Vegas, in addition to being an executive producer through the entire run of Elementary, a modern update of Sherlock Holmes that aired for seven seasons on CBS.

The Great Gatsby