Harriet the Spy, a new animated series starring Beanie Feldstein (American Crime Story, Booksmart), Jane Lynch (Glee, Wreck-It Ralph), and Lacey Chabert (Mean Girls, Lost in Space), has been ordered to series by Apple TV+, per The Hollywood Reporter. The series is produced by The Jim Henson Company, founded by Jim Henson, who created multiple children’s characters including the beloved Kermit the Frog.
Harriet the Spy is based on the 1964 children’s novel written and illustrated by Louise Fitzhugh. It follows Harriet M. Welsch, who “is a spy. In her notebook, she writes down everything she knows about everyone, even her classmates and her best friends. Then Harriet loses track of her notebook, and it ends up in the wrong hands. Before she can stop them, her friends have read the always truthful, sometimes awful things she’s written about each of them. Will Harriet find a way to put her life and her friendships back together?” (Scholastic).
Feldstein will voice Harriet, Lunch will voice Ole Golly, Harriet’s strict nanny, and Chabert will play Marion Hawthorne, the mean leader of the group of popular girls at Harriet’s school. The classic children’s novel has been adapted twice before, once as a 1996 Nickelodeon movie also named Harriet the Spy, starring Michelle Trachtenberg (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as Harriet; then as a 2010 Disney channel movie named Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars, starring Jennifer Stone (Wizards of Waverly Place) as Harriet and set in a high school and catered to a teen audience.
Apple TV+’s Harriet the Spy is part of a growing list of children’s content coming to the platform from the Jim Henson Company and Rehab Entertainment. The lineup includes Ghostwriter (created by Liz Nealon), Peanuts in Space: Secrets of Apollo 10 (directed by Morgan Neville), and the recently ordered Fraggle Rock (executive produced by Lisa Henson and Halle Stanford).