Recently I wrote about four of Reese’s book club picks that have been turned into TV shows (including the Witherspoon-led Little Fires Everywhere). It got me thinking: What other selections deserve a turn on the silver screen? Spoiler alert: many do, but I’ve narrowed it down to four titles that I would personally like to binge-watch ASAP. From a feminist take on Westerns to a thriller about a wedding gone wrong, here are my pitches for the next Reese-approved titles that should get the TV treatment.
4 Reese's Book Club Picks That I’m Begging Someone to Turn into TV Shows
It’s time, Reese
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Published Sep 3, 2024
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1. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal
OK, hear me out, Reese: This sexy page-turner would make a compulsively watchable series. In it, Nikki is the black sheep in a strict British Sikh family. After dropping out of law school, she begins teaching a writing class for Punjabi widows that quickly evolves into an erotic storytelling workshop…which is as kooky as it sounds. Part mystery, part romance, Jaswal’s terrific third novel celebrates how women of different generations can find common ground in the erotic fantasies both real and imagined, and as such I can totally see it resonating across a wide swath of viewers of all ages.
I haven’t seen so much as a minute of Yellowstone, but I do know that people eat that Western stuff up, so I think it’s time for a female-centric take on the genre. In Anna North’s pulse-racing, 2022 saga, it’s 1894 and it’s the day of 17-year-old Ada's wedding. She loves her husband, and she loves working with her mother, a midwife. But a year goes by and she’s still not pregnant, in a town where barren women are hanged as witches, she’s forced to leave behind everything she knows. She joins up with the Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a charismatic, grandiose preacher-turned-robber known as the Kid, who’s determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. The only snag is, to make this dream a reality, the Gang comes up with a plan that may get them all killed. A smart, feminist take on a classic genre featuring a courageous, root-for-able heroine? Please get the first season on my TV screen, stat.
3. The Guest List by Lucy Foley
Suspense lovers will hang on every word of Lucy Foley’s (The Paris Apartment) atmospheric thriller about a wedding gone wrong—and I think it would make the most perfect, twisty miniseries. On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate the marriage of a handsome and charming television star and a smart and ambitious magazine publisher. Everything is lovely, until the Champagne is popped and resentments and jealousies bubble to the surface. Then, someone turns up dead, and perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone in attendance is hiding a secret. Tell me you can’t imagine binge-watching it all play out on, say, Netflix…
4. On the Rooftop by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Set in 1950s San Francisco, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s (The Revisionists) terrific novel—that Witherspoon called “utterly original and brilliant”—centers on sisters Ruth, Esther and Chloe. The trio has been singing and dancing together since they could speak, and with the help of their mother, Vivian, they’ve become a bona fide girl group, The Salvations. By the time Vivian scores an offer from a talent manager—an offer she’s been praying for—the girls have become women, with dreams their mother can’t imagine. Mirroring what’s happening within the family, the neighborhood is changing, too:, as gentrification creeps in. Moving and expansive, On the Rooftop is the kind of family drama that would be right at home among Max’s offerings.
