NBC's 'Gatsby' Police Procedural Gives 'The Great Gatsby' a Gender-Swapped Twist

When F. Scott Fitzgerald published ‘The Great Gatsby‘ in 1925, it sold fewer than 25,000 copies before he died. Today it has sold nearly 30 million, and it has been turned into stage productions, an opera and 5 film versions. Every few years, another ‘The Great Gatsby’ reimagining arrives to test how far the story can stretch.

The pace of those reinventions picked up after January 1, 2021, when the novel entered the public domain. Within weeks, A+E Studios and ITV Studios America announced a series from ‘Vikings’ creator Michael Hirst, with Fitzgerald’s great-granddaughter Blake Hazard on board as a consulting producer. Another project, ‘Gatz’, set out to reimagine the story as a prequel built on the theory that Gatsby was a mixed-race man.

Now a very different take is on the way. According to an exclusive from Deadline, NBC is developing a modern-day police procedural built on the novel, with a gender twist in the mix. The series is simply titled ‘Gatsby’ and comes from writers and executive producers Jake Coburn and Jason Tracey, in association with Universal Television.

The change applies to the book’s narrator rather than its title character. Nick Carraway, the bond salesman who lives next door to Gatsby, becomes Nicole “Nicky” Carraway, a decorated New York State Police detective who was born to be a cop but dreams of becoming a writer. That detail keeps a trace of the novel’s observer-turned-storyteller, even if the setting is completely different.

Jay Gatsby, meanwhile, remains Jay. He’s billed as Det. Jay Gatsby, a devilishly charming investigator with a con man’s gift for reading human behavior. The pairing sets up a classic procedural partnership, one built on charm and instinct and the other on duty and ambition.

The shift from Jazz Age Long Island to a crime-drama setting is a major leap. In the book, Nick moves to the fictional neighborhood of West Egg, where he becomes drawn into Gatsby’s world while trying to rekindle a romance with his cousin Daisy Buchanan. NBC’s version swaps the lavish parties for casework, though details on how much of the original plot will survive haven’t been shared.

The project remains in development, and no premiere timetable has been given. That means there’s no confirmed cast, no pilot order and no sign yet of how closely the series will follow Fitzgerald’s themes of ambition, reinvention and illusion. For now, the logline is the only real window into the show.

The creative team does have a track record in the genre. Coburn is an NBC veteran who most recently served as co-showrunner and executive producer of the procedural ‘The Hunting Party’, which ran for 2 seasons. Tracey, according to The A.V. Club, was an executive producer on all 7 seasons of ‘Elementary’, a procedural that gave a classic literary character a gender-flipped twist of its own.

That comparison is hard to miss. ‘Elementary’ took a public domain icon, Sherlock Holmes, and placed him in a modern crime-solving framework, and ‘Gatsby’ appears to follow the same blueprint. NBC also has a long history of success with procedurals, from ‘Law & Order’ to ‘Hill Street Blues’, so the network is playing to a strength.

Not everyone is convinced. Some critics have pointed out that the new series appears to share little beyond a few character names with Fitzgerald’s novel. Others have noted that getting a project greenlit is far easier when it’s tied to existing intellectual property, especially when that property is free to use.

Still, the idea has its curiosity factor. Screen Rant described the project as carrying 2 major story twists, and the combination of a literary classic with a case-of-the-week format is unusual enough to draw attention. Whether it becomes a smart reinvention or a gimmick will depend on how the writers handle the characters at its center.

At a time when networks are hungry for familiar titles, ‘Gatsby’ fits neatly into the trend of reimagining public domain classics for modern audiences. Whether viewers will want to follow a charming con-man detective and his writerly partner remains to be seen, but the premise is bold enough to start the conversation.