Ashley Tisdale lit a corner of the Internet on fire in January when she published a personal essay in The Cut about “breaking up” with a toxic mom group. The piece, which cast a collective of new moms as a kind of petty high school clique, quickly led Internet detectives to try to determine which famous figures were members, speculation that ballooned after Hilary Duff’s husband called Tisdale “The Most Self-Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth” in a social post parodying the article. Mandy Moore and Meghan Trainor later weighed in.
Now, the former teen star of High School Musical and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody is executive producing a half-hour dark comedy for Netflix called Toxic Moms, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. Search Party and Benefits with Friends writer Sabrina Jalees is writing and executive producing, while standup comedian and Beef star Ali Wong is also executive producing.
Deadline was the first to report on the series, stating that the series is “based on an original idea” and “informed by Tisdale’s experience as a mom of two young children.” Netflix and representatives for Tisdale, Jalees and Wong did not answer the question of whether the piece was optioned for the series or whether it was in the works prior to Tisdale’s piece or was inspired by it to THR.
But clearly the series is riding on the coattails of the drama. The series is set to foreground a sleep-deprived new mother who joins a group of rich and aspirational moms that has a dark underbelly — a premise that doesn’t seem dissimilar from Tisdale’s experience of being the odd one out in a group of women “building brands, running their own companies, launching creative projects.”
It’s an interesting career move for Tisdale, who otherwise continues to voice a character in Disney’s Phineas and Ferb and previously executive produced ABC Family’s sitcom Young & Hungry, which ended in 2018. She owns the lifestyle brand Frenshe, a blog that has expanded into haircare and beauty products.
If the series is ordered by Netflix, it will join the streamer’s library of scripted comedies including recent titles Running Point, The Four Seasons, Nobody Wants This and A Man on the Inside. Coming up, the streamer will be releasing I Suck at Girls and A Hundred Percent.
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