Eddie Murphy Eyes First Live-Action Scripted TV Series With Peacock’s ‘The Chairman’

Eddie Murphy has conquered stand-up, sketch comedy, blockbuster movies and animation, but there is somehow still one major box left unchecked on that résumé.

Television drama. Murphy is attached to star in The Chairman, a new drama currently in development at Peacock from Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner. If Peacock gives the project a series order, it would mark Murphy’s first role as the star of a live-action scripted television series.

Yes, somehow Eddie Murphy has gone more than four decades without doing this. Plot details are being kept under wraps for now, so we do not yet know who Murphy would play, what exactly The Chairman refers to or whether we should be preparing for boardrooms, politics, crime, family warfare or something completely different. What we do know is that pairing Murphy with the creator of Mad Men immediately makes this one of those projects worth keeping an eye on.

Murphy will also produce the potential series alongside Weiner, with Universal Television and 101 Studios behind the project. There is no announced production start date, additional cast or premiere window yet, which makes sense considering The Chairman is still in the development stage rather than officially greenlit.

That distinction matters because Murphy is not packing his bags for a Peacock set tomorrow. The pieces are coming together, but the streamer still has to decide whether The Chairman moves forward as a series.

If it does, though, the project would take Murphy somewhere audiences have rarely seen him. He became a television phenomenon as a young cast member on Saturday Night Live before quickly becoming one of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars, building a career that includes Beverly Hills Cop, Coming to America, The Nutty Professor, Shrek and plenty more.

He has also proven that drama is very much in his wheelhouse. Murphy earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance in Dreamgirls, so putting him at the center of a prestige-style television drama is not nearly as wild as it might sound at first.

Weiner brings his own very specific TV history to the project. Beyond creating Mad Men, he spent years writing and producing The Sopranos and later created The Romanoffs. Putting that storytelling background together with Murphy’s screen presence could make for a very interesting combination. After everything Eddie Murphy has already done, the idea that television still has a “first” left for him is kind of remarkable.

Peacock has not yet ordered The Chairman to series, but if that green light comes, Eddie Murphy may finally be adding “live-action TV drama lead” to a résumé that was already doing just fine without it.