Saturday Night Live Fan-Favorite Star to Get a New Series Based on His Life

Saturday Night Live and The Suicide Squad star Pete Davidson is set to star in a new comedy series titled Bupkis. The story will be a gritty and stylized version of Davidson’s own life story, and will be co-written by Davidson, Dave Sirus, and Crashing‘s Judah Miller. According to Deadline, who broke the story, Saturday Night Live‘s Lorne Michaels will produce through his Broadway Video banner and Universal Television. Per the report, Bupkis is described as “a raw, unflinching, fictionalized version of Pete Davidson’s real life. It will include a mixture of grounded storytelling with absurd elements depicting an unfiltered view through Pete’s eyes.”

The initial statement name-checks Curb Your Enthusiasm as a touchstone, and says that Bupkis will “reflect Davidson’s real-life persona with an unapologetically unfiltered,R-rated storytelling.” There is no guarantee that Universal TV will mean the show goes to Peacock; while the NBC-owned streamer is near the top of the list, producers (including Davidson, Sirus, Miller, Michaels, and Broadway’s Andrew Singer and Erin David) are shopping it to other interested streamers, including Prime Video.

Last month, Davidson announced that he was going to be missing some SNL episodes because he is shooting The Home, a new horror film from Miramax and director James DeMonaco. He also played Blackguard (briefly) in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. In the earliest days of Saturday Night Live, actors were not allowed to leave to work on side projects, leading to major cast losses like Chevy Chase. A recent Fly on the Wall Podcast interview between Dana Carvey, David Spade, and Conan O’Brien revealed that those rules remained in place well into the 1990s, when Spade was forbidden from taking a Super Bowl ad.

On the other hand, Michaels is no stranger to producing projects like Schmigadoon!, which stars Cecily Strong, or Kenan, which stars Kenan Thompson, these days. Sirus and Miller previously collaborated on the screenplay for The King of Staten Island.