If there’s one winner to come out of this Ashley Madison tits-up tragedy, it’s the TV execs who desperately needed an idea for a series, and stumbled upon one in the blanket media coverage of the Ashley Madison hack.
This is not a drill – an Ashley Madison TV show is in the early stages. The two responsible for the impending monstrosity are Steven Marrs and Courtney Hazlett, who decided the story of a (fictional) mother who starts a (non-fictional) extra-marital affairs website to support her family was worthy of the TV treatment.
Its working title? Thank You Ashley Madison. Vom. Not in line with the current feelings towards the pro-infidelity / anti-privacy website, hey.
Hazlett told THR:
“There are a lot of TV shows doing a great job of presenting marriage storylines in new ways, but what we’re positing here is, what if there is a third lane to run in and what if you were honest about it? What if you didn’t need a hack to have this conversation? Maybe this is where your life just it, and no shows on television are offering that.”
Well, yes, until you consider that an extra-marital affair has featured as a plot line in approximately forty fucking thousand TV shows already – and almost once an episode for quality trash.
“Anytime 30 million people are doing anything, it becomes worthy of a real discussion,” says Hazlett, although considers it too “stereotypical” to tell the true story of man Noel Biderman starting it – a working mum it must be.
In other, equally disturbing news, turns out Ashley Madison was working on an app called What’s Your Wife Worth back in 2013, which is depressingly exactly what it sounds like. Dudes – presumably those same dudes on AM to have an affair – upload a picture of their wife, while rating and assigning dollar values to others.
The app was discovered in the hacked and published AM emails. Biderman thought the app was “really good”, although it was abandoned due to, as one employee put it, being “horrible developed”. Probably in both senses of the word, really.
BRB, turning the shower taps to scalding.
