CULTURE

Lori Loughlin’s College Cheating Scandal Is Being Turned Into a TV Show

Accepted* will look at the flawed college admissions process.


Olivia Jade x Sephora Collection Launch
Gabriel Olsen/Getty Images for Sephora Collection

As the past couple of months have shown, the world can’t get enough of stories about the college cheating scandal that Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, among others, were involved in. Accordingly, a new TV series detailing it is officially in the works.

The show will be based not only on the ongoing saga, which has opened up the national discourse on how flawed the college admissions process is (and unjust for the majority of students who don’t have wealthy parents to help them get into and pay for school), but also on a book that documents it. The limited series will draw from Accepted, an upcoming work of nonfiction by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz, as Collider notes.

Annapurna Television just optioned the rights to the book and is working on a limited series centered around it. It has an impressive pedigree, too: The script will be handled by D.V. Devincentis, who won an Emmy for his writing on 2016’s American Crime Story: The People Vs. O.J. Simpson. Meanwhile, Sue Naegle, Ali Krug, and Patrick Chu will produce the series.

Other than those details, there isn’t much information available about how the show will look, when or where it will air, how many episodes it will consist of, and, most pressingly, who they’ll get to play Loughlin and her influencer daughter Olivia Jade.

Of course, that story is still being written, as Loughlin refused a plea deal that would have allowed her to be judged on only one charge: conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud. After she and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, who is also being charged in the case, rejected that proposition, the couple was hit with another charge for money laundering. While Loughlin hasn’t issued any statements about the pending case, it’s been suggested that the reason she’s been so, speculatively, casual about the whole ordeal is that she didn’t fully realize her actions were illegal, allegedly.

Huffman, on the other hand, pled guilty at the top of April and issued a statement of remorse, saying, “I am ashamed of the pain I have caused my daughter, my family, my friends, my colleagues, and the educational community. I want to apologize to them and, especially, I want to apologize to the students who work hard every day to get into college, and to their parents who make tremendous sacrifices to support their children and do so honestly.”