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This is really exciting, but I'm also desperately curious as to how they're going to handle it. One season per novel? Starting with the first one? Or jumping right in to the second?
Scott is 42, so the first novel would be a heavy lift. And it's so different tonally and structurally from the others that starting with the second would make a lot more sense in a bunch of ways.
What I REALLY want is for them to maintain the eerie time-shifting quality of the novels, which were published decades apart, and each set in the then-present day, but written as if Ripley had hardly aged at all in between them.
And then there's the issue of his sexuality, which Highsmith was quite . . . ambivalent about.
In conclusion, yes, I am weirdly obsessed with the Ripley novels, and yes, I will have many feelings to share as this project moves forward.
Oops. Turns out I've got a little more already.
Assuming they start with the second novel, their biggest challenge will be managing the expectations of the huge number of viewers whose only experience of Ripley is the movie. So...
...why not just conceive the series as an explicit sequel to the movie? Set in France in the 1970s, with Ripley in his late 30s, living off the Greenleaf fortune. Confirmedly, canonically gay or bisexual, but discreet. Still married to Héloïse, his hot young wife from the novels.
Split the difference between the movie and the latter novels, and I think you've got the makings of something really fun.
More thoughts: I was wrong about keeping the time-jumping stuff. It's great in the novels, but doesn't add anything to a TV show. Junk it. Set the whole series in the seventies, because a zillion core plot points from the novels don't work in an era of instant communication.
