Steven Soderbergh's 'The Girlfriend Experience' Is Now a TV Series

Well, if Spike Lee can turn She's Gotta Have It into a TV series, why can't Steven Soderbergh do the same for one of his more experimental efforts, The Girlfriend Experience? The film starred ex-porn star Sasha Grey as a high-end call girl, and basically explored her personal issues and those of her many clients. At only a cost of about $1.3M it still struggled to recoup those expenses, which may be why Soderbergh kind of veered away from movies of this type afterwards. While the film was probably too slow for audiences, the concept is solid and that's what the Starz network is banking on now.

Starz has ordered a 13-episode series based on The Girlfriend Experience, with each installment running thirty minutes in length. Soderbergh will exec-produce alongside Philip Fleishman, and they've scored big by getting Amy Seimetz (Upstream Color) and Lodge Kerrigan (Keane) to write and direct. So how does Soderbergh plan to make this version different than what was done before?

Soderbergh: "We're in an exciting period of auteur-driven television right now. When Philip floated the idea of a 'Girlfriend Experience'-inspired television show, I thought: 'let's make it a different woman in a different city, let's pair two independent writer/directors, one male and one female, and let them do the whole thing.' I've known Lodge for 20 years and I became a fan of Amy's when I saw her first feature last summer. We went to Chris Albrecht because he and I have been trying to find something to do together since we did 'K Street' 11 years ago. He responded without hesitation to both the idea of the show and the approach."

Sounds good, and if Soderbergh is truly done making movies then we're fortunate to have him keeping busy on the small screen. Later this summer his Cinemax series, The Knick, debuts with Clive Owen starring.

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