TV

Woody Allen casts Elaine May, Miley Cyrus to star alongside him in six-episode Amazon series

Woody Allen shared the Broadway stage with Elaine May — although not onstage together, technically — as writers in 2011 for “Relatively Speaking,” a collection of one-act plays. Allen did cast the legendary May back in 2000 for his movie, Small Time Crooks.

And he’s turning back the clock once more to work with May, and also with Miley Cyrus, for his new, still-untitled, six-episode Amazon Studios series.

Amazon confirmed Monday that Allen not only will be writing and directing the six half-hours, but also will appear onscreen alongside May and Cyrus. It’ll be set in the 1960s. Not much more is known as of now.

But Amazon had offered Allen a full series in 2015 without asking him to go through the same public pilot process that its other streaming hits — which include back-to-back Golden Globe wins for the studio in the comedy/musical series category with Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle, respectively. Allen told Deadline last summer that he never watches television, but that Amazon kept making better offers. “Well, this went on for a year and a half, and they kept making a better deal and a better deal. Finally they said look, we’ll do anything that you want, just give us six half hours. They can be black and white, they can take place in Paris, in New York and California, they can be about a family, they can be comedy, you can be in them, they can be tragic. We don’t have to know anything, just come in with six half hours. And they offered a lot of money and everybody around me was pressuring me, go ahead and do it, what do you have to lose?”

He has thought of the Amazon project as a movie — like the dozens he already has written and directed over the decades — just in six half-hour parts. It’s due by year’s end.

Miley Cyrus, for her part, posted this photo and announcement last night:

Sean L. McCarthy

Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

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