Starz Wants To Make Steven Soderbergh’s “The Girlfriend Experience” Into A Series

Steven Soderbergh's retirement from directing seems to be going great so far. In addition to shooting & editing the Magic Mike sequel, the Starz network has just greenlit a series based on his 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience, a film most famous for helping Sasha Grey go mainstream. 

According to Deadline Hollywood (link below), the series will go beyond the film's premise to explore more women within this world.

Soderbergh and Philip Fleishman executive produce the half-hour series, from Transactional Pictures, which explores the relationships of the most exclusive courtesans who provide their clients with far more than just sex. These purveyors – or GFEs (Girlfriend Experience) – share intimacies more common to romantic partners or husbands and wives, becoming quasi-lovers and confidants who are richly paid for their time. “Many of these women are extremely accomplished,” said Fleishman. “They range from musicians in major orchestras to PhD candidates in the sciences and often feel empowered by the control and economic freedom their work as GFE’s affords them. The question is whether they define a new genus of contemporary relationship, or have relationships always been transactionally based in one form or another?”

Soderbergh will not be writing or directing at all, turning it over instead to two of his contemporaries.

Soderbergh and  Fleishman executive producer along with independent filmmakers Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz, who will also write and direct on the series. “We’re in an exciting period of auteur-driven television right now,” Soderbergh said. “When Philip floated the idea of a Girlfriend Experience-inspired television show, I thought: ‘let’s make it a different woman in a different city, let’s pair two independent writer-directors, one male and one female, and let them do the whole thing.”

No word yet on when the series will begin shooting or even premiere, but we'll keep you up to date with the latest news as it develops.

Via Deadline Hollywood