At long last, debt collection goes Hollywood! Brad Pitt's productio company Plan B and HBO are developing what looks like a new TV series called "Paper," a drama inspired by Jake Halpern's essay "Pay Up" featured in the New Yorker. "Paper" features a gangster trying to clean up his life and support his children as a single parent through a professional debt collector’s job. He finds, however, that life in the debt collection business can be just as lethal as the biz he's struggling to leave behind. I am excited for the TV series, which I picture to be a bit like  a combination of Breaking Bad and the Wire, without the drugs or the frontier or backwater towns. 

In Pay Up, the dad involved collected on aging payday loans, the kind of debt almost no one pays on. The project is classified as “in development,” with no production schedule set. Currently, there are at least two producers and one writer attached, so we should see this series or at least ads for it in about a year.