A four-hour miniseries based on James Comey’s bestseller “A Higher Loyalty” is on its way. Scheduled to begin production next month, it is from CBS Studios and will land on Showtime or CBS All Access or both. I do hope it’s on Showtime; the pay streaming platform CBS All Access still feels like it lives in another world.
Jeff Daniels will star as James Comey, which sounds about right. The rest of the cast features Brendan Gleeson as Donald Trump, Holly Hunter as Acting Attorney General Sally Yates. Michael Kelly as Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and Jennifer Ehle as Patrice Comey.
The adaptation of Comey’s book, which has sold over 2 million copies, will be written and directed by Billy Ray, the Oscar-nominated writer of “Captain Phillips” among many other movies. About casting Gleeson (from “In Bruges,” “Gangs of New York,” and the Harry Potter films) as Trump, Ray said in a statement, “You have to have presence, and a singular kind of dynamism. You also have to have the courage and the will to play Trump’s psychology from the inside out. Oh, and you have to be spectacularly talented and watchable. Not many actors check all those boxes. Brendan does. I’m ecstatic about this.”