Jennifer Aniston is set to play an abusive mother in a television adaptation of former child star Jennette McCurdy’s bestselling memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died.
McCurdy, 33, first found fame as a star of the Nickelodeon sitcom iCarly. In her 2022 book, she opened up about the emotional and physical abuse she had suffered at the hands of her mother Debra from the time she was a young girl. Her mother died in 2013 of breast cancer.
Apple TV+ announced today that 56-year-old Friends star Aniston will executive produce and star in a new dramedy series formed from the book.
McCurdy will write and showrun the series alongside Ari Katcher, who is known for his work on Ramy and Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show. Bad Sisters and Catastrophe writer Sharon Horgan is also among the producers.
It has not yet been announced who will play McCurdy.
In an official synopsis, Apple TV+ describes the series as “a heartbreaking and hilarious recounting of McCurdy’s struggles as a former child actor while dealing with her overbearing, domineering mother.
“The dramedy will center on the codependent relationship between an 18-year-old actress in a hit kid’s show, and her narcissistic mother who relishes in her identity as ‘a starlet’s mother,’ set to be played by Aniston.”
Among the many allegations McCurdy made in her book is the claim that her mother “explicitly” told her how to engage in disordered eating.
In the memoir, McCurdy wrote that her mother taught her disordered eating so that she could delay puberty and continue to land child roles to support her family.
In a separate interview with The Cut, McCurdy said: “As a survival instinct and a coping mechanism growing up, I couldn’t face that it was an eating disorder, and I just lived in the delusion that this was mom’s way of helping me and helping my career.
“In therapy and in retrospect, recognizing that as such obvious abuse, it’s unsettling,” she continued.
Elsewhere in the interview, the former child star revealed that when one doctor suggested she might have an eating disorder, the idea was vehemently denied both by McCurdy and her mother.
“My first therapist had suggested that she was abusive, and that led me to leave that therapist,” McCurdy told the publication, adding, “I couldn’t handle the idea that my mother was abusive because that would mean reframing my entire life. The one narrative of my life was ‘Mommy knows best.’”
