Ashley Tisdale lit a corner of the Web on fire in January when she published a personal essay in The Cut about “breaking up” with a toxic mom group. The piece, which solid a collective of latest mothers as a type of petty highschool clique, quickly led Web detectives to try to find out which famous figures were members, speculation that ballooned after Hilary Duff’s husband called Tisdale “The Most Self-Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth” in a social post parodying the article. Mandy Moore and Meghan Trainor later weighed in.
Now, the previous teen star of High School Musical and The Suite Lifetime of Zack & Cody is executive producing a half-hour dark comedy for Netflix called Toxic Mothers, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. Search Party and Advantages with Friends author Sabrina Jalees is writing and executive producing, while standup comedian and Beef star Ali Wong can also be executive producing.
Deadline was the primary to report on the series, stating that the series is “based on an original idea” and “informed by Tisdale’s experience as a mom of two young children.” Netflix and representatives for Tisdale, Jalees and Wong didn’t answer the query of whether the piece was optioned for the series or whether it was within the works prior to Tisdale’s piece or was inspired by it to THR.
But clearly the series is riding on the coattails of the drama. The series is ready to foreground a sleep-deprived recent mother who joins a gaggle of wealthy and aspirational mothers that has a dark underbelly — a premise that doesn’t seem dissimilar from Tisdale’s experience of being the odd one out in a gaggle of ladies “constructing brands, running their very own firms, launching creative projects.”
It’s an interesting profession move for Tisdale, who otherwise continues to voice a personality in Disney’s Phineas and Ferb and previously executive produced ABC Family’s sitcom Young & Hungry, which resulted in 2018. She owns the life-style brand Frenshe, a blog that has expanded into haircare and wonder products.
If the series is ordered by Netflix, it is going to join the streamer’s library of scripted comedies including recent titles Running Point, The 4 Seasons, No one Wants This and A Man on the Inside. Coming up, the streamer will likely be releasing I Suck at Girls and A Hundred Percent.