Will Ferrell To Headline Golf Comedy Series In Works From Rian Johnson

EXCLUSIVE: In what is shaping up to become one of the biggest TV comedy packages to hit the marketplace in awhile, Will Ferrell & Jessica Elbaum’s Gloria Sanchez Productions and Rian Johnson & Ram Bergman’s T-Street have teamed up to develop a comedy TV series as a starring vehicle for Ferrell, I have learned.

No one would comment but I hear the series revolves around a professional golfer who becomes the face of a controversial new league competing with the PGA.

While fictional, the story would inevitably draw parallels to the controversial LIV Golf startup. It also evokes one of Ferrell’s signature movies, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. The series is in a similar tone, I hear, bringing Ferrell back to the sports arena he also explored in Blades of Glory and Semi-Pro.

Ferrell and Elbaum executive produce for Gloria Sanchez; Johnson and Bergman executive produce alongside T-Street’s President of TV Nena Rodrigue. Johnson is not expected to write or direct.

This would mark the first comedy series for Ferrell who rose to fame on Saturday Night Live and parlayed that hot start into a feature stardom. As an actor, his only major TV role since SNL has been in the Apple TV+ dark comedy-drama limited series The Shrink Next Door, in which he starred opposite Paul Rudd.

In Television, T-Street is riding high on the breakout success of Johnson’s Peacock comedy mystery series Poker Face. Gloria Sanchez is coming off Netflix’s black comedy Dead to Me, which ran for three seasons.

Ferrell is an avid golf player and has hosted The Will Powered Golf Classic, a fundraising event benefiting Cancer for College, for two decades. He next stars opposite Reese Witherspoon in Amazon’s wedding comedy movie You’re Cordially Invited. Ferrell is repped by UTA, Mosaic and Jackoway Austen Tyerman.

Johnson is repped by CAA and Lichter, Grossman, Nichols.