Joseph Gordon-Levitt to Star as Johnny Carson in Drama Series From Deadwood Creator

3rd Rock From the Sun star Joseph Gordon-Levitt may have landed his latest television role. On Tuesday, reports indicated that King of Late Night, a television project that would star Gordon-Levitt as television icon Johnny Carson, has entered the marketplace and is being considered by potential buyers. The series, which is a co-production between wiip and Anonymous Content, would be written by Deadwood creator David Milch and directed by Bombshell‘s Jay Roach. Gordon-Levitt would also executive produce the project.

King of Late Night would follow the life and career of late-night TV pioneer Johnny Carson from New York to Los Angeles to the Las Vegas strip. The series would reveal how Johnny’s diehard connection to his audience overlapped with his lifelong desire for a basic quality of life, and how his beloved on-screen persona came into conflict with the more colorful aspects of his personal life. The project was initially developed by Milch and Anonymous Content nearly five years ago, with the television scribe reportedly working on the script for a couple of years prior to being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2019.

Gordon-Levitt previously created, wrote, directed, executive-produced, and starred in Mr. Corman, a television series about a former musician working as a fifth-grade public school teacher in Los Angeles who finds himself wondering what exactly he’s doing with his life. The series was cancelled by Apple TV+ after one season back in October of 2021. Gordon-Levitt can most recently be seen in the Showtime series Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, in which he portrays Uber founder Travis Kalanick.

“In order to make this story a work of entertainment, you have to lean into the primal emotional stuff,” Gordon-Levitt explained in a recent interview with Uproxx. “That’s what makes entertainment, entertainment. And I think that it is totally honest, and I think it is worth acknowledging that that’s why… I think that’s a big part of why these things happen is because they are attractive. They do appeal to our animal selves to just take what you want and f-ck everybody else. And there is something attractive about watching that. There’s something attractive about playing that. And that’s why it keeps happening over and over in history.”

“I don’t think that a work of entertainment can present a holistic argument of why not to do that,” Gordon-Levitt continued. “Because a holistic argument of why not to do that requires that we kind of set aside some of those primal animal, emotional feelings. And instead, start activating our logic, intuition, hard work, kind of as Daniel Kahneman calls it system 2 thinking. It’s stuff that we don’t want to think about when we sit down and watch TV. If you make a show like that, people won’t watch it because that’s not entertainment. That’s academia or that’s school or that’s work. And so to me, the role of entertainment here is to entertain you. Appeal to those urges, make you feel those feelings and simultaneously ask some questions. I think an irresponsible version of Super Pumped would be the one that doesn’t ask those questions. That only shows you the fun parts and doesn’t show you any of the downsides. That doesn’t show you Travis’s shortcomings. And this show is unflinching in showing you.”

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h/t: Deadline