The Chairman (Peacock)

Our Review

The Early Word, because this is an announcement page and nothing more: Variety reported on October 1, 2026 that Eddie Murphy is attached to star in The Chairman, a drama series in development at Peacock created by Matthew Weiner. If it gets the greenlight, it will be the first live-action scripted series of Murphy’s career, a fact that sounds like a typo until you sit with it. Forty-four years into a job that started on Saturday Night Live at nineteen, the man who did Beverly Hills Cop, Coming to America, Dreamgirls and Dolemite has simply never done television drama. His only scripted TV role at all was voice work on The PJs, the animated series he co-created. Whatever your theory is about why, the fact itself is one of the great oddities of modern stardom.

The other half of the pairing is the story. Weiner created Mad Men, widely treated as the best-written show of its era, after cutting his teeth as a writer and executive producer on The Sopranos. He is not a person who attaches his name to projects lightly, and the machinery around this one says Peacock wants it badly: produced by Universal Television and 101 Studios, the David Glasser-run company behind Yellowstone, under the first-look deal NBCUniversal signed with them in January. It is also the first project out of ex-Paramount boss Chris McCarthy’s consulting arrangement at NBCU, reported last November. Murphy and Weiner both produce. That is a studio, a boutique with a prestige track record, and a shop with a ratings history, all pointed at one idea we have not been told the plot of.

What we do not have, stated plainly: no plot details, no supporting cast, no showrunner beyond Weiner’s creator credit, not even a series order, since the trade’s own language is in development. Which means no score from us, and no premiere date from us either. Anyone posting a synopsis or a release window for The Chairman right now is making it up.

What we’ll watch for, when and if it gets made: what Weiner does with a lead whose entire mythology is comedy. Mad Men worked because Jon Hamm could play a man performing confidence; Murphy projects it so cheaply he gave it away for ninety minutes at a time for four decades, and a drama gets to ask what’s under it. This page updates the second a greenlight, a cast member, or a single plot sentence exists. Until then, the honest state of The Chairman is one announcement, two very big names, and a network that assembled the paperwork before anyone said yes.