Comedian and suit aficionado Adam Conover has announced that he's coming to Netflix in a new comedy series called The G Word with Adam Conover. Described as a sketch comedy series with documentarian elements set within the federal government, The G Word teams Conover with Higher Ground, Barack and Michelle Obama's production company.
This news also means, as Conover has confirmed on Twitter, that Conover's previous show, the educational comedy Adam Ruins Everything on truTV, is officially over. The last episode of its third season, which aired in October of 2019, has turned out to be its series finale.
The G Word (not to be confused with the recently-Kickstarted documentary by Marc Smolowitz) is loosely based upon the 2018 best-selling non-fiction book The Fifth Risk, by Vanity Fair's Michael Lewis. It documents the notoriously bizarre transition process between the Obama and Trump administrations, with a focus on individual employees within the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Commerce. (Long story short: Trump's people didn't know how anything worked and were not interested in learning the details.)
In keeping with that, the early word on The G Word With Adam Conover is that it's intended to examine the federal government from an insider's perspective, with a focus like The Fifth Risk on the individual employees that make it work. There's been no information yet on casting besides Conover, or the overall intended tone of the show; it's probably safe to assume that it will have a more grounded tone than Ruins Everything did. Then again, so do most fever dreams.
Conover, who will host and executive produce The G Word, also voiced multiple roles on Netflix's Bojack Horseman. He currently hosts The Crystal Maze on Nickelodeon, an American adaptation of the long-running British children's game show, and a current-events podcast called Factually! Frequent YouTube viewers may recognize him as an early contributor to the Los Angeles-based sketch comedy channel CollegeHumor. Presumably, he does not sleep.
This appears to be Higher Ground's first foray into TV, after previously producing three film-length documentaries—American Factory, Crip Camp, and Becoming—in 2019 and 2020, as well as Michelle Obama's eponymous podcast. All three of Higher Ground's films to date have been distributed by Netflix, in keeping with the multi-year deal the Obamas signed with Netflix in 2018. American Factory, which depicts the experiences of workers at a Chinese-owned factory in Moraine, Ohio, won just about every award that it could win this year, including an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
The G Word with Adam Conover is scheduled to begin filming in 2021.
Source: Adam Conover/Twitter