The Corrections is finally coming to Netflix.

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, the seismic family saga you couldn’t avoid in the early aughts, is finally getting a screen adaptation.

In 2012, Noah Baumbach and Scott Rudin attempted to lasso that late modernist moon for a much-hyped HBO mini-series starring Chris Cooper and Dianne Wiest. But this project was bedeviled with budget trouble, and axed before anyone got to see it. We assume the pilot’s in a Hollywood vault somewhere, locked away with Indy’s Holy Grail and all the other first swings that never saw daylight.

Correcting The Corrections has since become something of an in-joke for those of us inclined toward prestige drama—on page, and onscreen. But it seems the faithful will be vindicated at last.

Not for the first time, Meryl Streep is swooping in to save the day: a limited series with her highness at the helm is now officially Netflix bound, under the direction of the Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Cord Jefferson.

Franzen will adapt his own book. And as creative partners go, Jefferson feels like a strong pick for the material, given that he’s already cut his teeth on literary fiction. The director won his Oscar for 2023’s American Fiction, based on Percival Everett’s Erasure. And before that, he won an Emmy for his work on HBO’s Watchmen. 

Corrections Redux joins a new prestige drama slate at Netflix, part and parcel of the company’s ongoing attempt to fight it out with Paramount for all the eyeballs in America. Over the next few years, we can expect a lot of literary adaptations from the streamer: Jess Walter’s novel So Far Gone is headed toward production, as well as a show based on Charles Burns’s graphic novel, Black Hole.

But of all the doorstoppers, this book—despite its creator’s occasional fondness for the taste of feet in his own mouth—has long felt suited to the slow boiling family drama treatment. Billed as a “sharply comic portrait of a Midwestern family,” the novel contains a bouquet of brilliant, dysfunctional characters.

I personally can’t wait to see who else is tapped to fill out the Lambert clan.