Succession Favorite To Lead Netflix’s Next Big Period Drama, Report Says
Succession star Jeremy Strong will lead and executive-produce Crossroads, a Netflix period drama in development, per a new report.
Jeremy Strong is lining up another big swing: a 1970s family drama at Netflix that lives in the gray areas he loves. Yes, it is based on a Jonathan Franzen novel. Of course it is.
Netflix is developing Crossroads with Jeremy Strong headlining
As of February 5, 2026, Netflix has a series adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's 2021 novel Crossroads in development, with Jeremy Strong set to star and also serve as executive producer. The story zeroes in on a Midwestern minister and his family as their carefully managed lives begin to split at the seams during the early 70s.
"A darkly funny, epic American family drama set in the early 1970s."
At the center is, as the description puts it, "a Midwestern pastor and his family" whose world unravels after a scandal inside the church. Franzen published Crossroads as the first book in a planned trilogy titled A Key to All Mythologies, so if this goes, there is plenty of runway.
Who is making it
The series comes from Media Res, with Amy Herzog writing and executive producing. Michael Ellenberg and Lindsey Springer are also executive producing for Media Res, and Franzen himself is on board as an EP. That last part is a quietly big deal for a literary adaptation.
Where this fits in Strong's current slate
If Netflix gives Crossroads a series order, it would join another literary adaptation Strong already has at the streamer: he is currently filming The Boys From Brazil, based on Ira Levin's novel. He also plans to star in 9/12, a Paramount+ limited series about a landmark legal case involving 9/11 first responders. Busy man, very on brand.
The Strong of it all
Strong won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe in 2022 for playing Kendall Roy on HBO's Succession, the show that turned striving into a contact sport. In 2025, he picked up his first Academy Award for portraying Roy Cohn in The Apprentice. On the film side, his credits include Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, The Big Short, Zero Dark Thirty, and Parkland. Crossroads sounds like a very particular kind of pressure cooker, which is exactly his lane.
About Amy Herzog
Herzog's TV work includes Scenes From a Marriage and Savant. On stage, she has been racking up major nods: Tony nominations for A Doll's House in 2023, and for Mary Jane and An Enemy of the People in 2024. Her play 4000 Miles was a Pulitzer Prize finalist back in 2013. Bringing her sensibility to a 70s-set family knot should make the fireworks feel earned.
Expect a moral storm in shag carpet and wood paneling. That is not a complaint.