"The Simpsons" will head to their own little version of West Egg in a "Great Gatsby"-themed hour-long episode.
FoxGatsby believed in the green light. Montgomery Burns believes in the greenbacks. Kind of the same?
"The Simpsons" will present its own weirdly Springfieldian hip-hop version of "The Great Gatsby" in the Fox show's first-ever one-hour episode, which will air in January, Entertainment Weekly reports.
Mr. Burns will play a Gatsby-like character who meets a new-money hip-hop mogul, Jay G. (as in "Jay Gatsby"). As you can guess, disaster ensues, "Simpsons"-style, with hapless Homer narrating the action, a la Nick from F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel.
It's not the first time Fitzgerald's characters have been rethought with a hip-hop accent -- Leonardo DiCaprio played Gatsby to Tobey Maguire's Nick in a 2013 movie version that divided critics.
Why the double-length show? "This was just going to be a regular episode, but the table read went so well, in a fit of passion and excitement and ambition and excess, we decided to supersize it," executive producer Matt Selman told Entertainment Weekly. "And we haven't done a huge amount of stories in the world of hip-hop and rap culture, so we just went for it."
Keegan-Michael Key and Taraji P. Henson will provide guest voices, with Henson playing Praline, a "Simpsons"-ized version of her "Empire" character, Cookie.
"Part 1 of the show I would subtitle as 'The Betrayal,' and part 2 I would subtitle as 'The Revenge,'" Selman told the magazine. "It's kind of like a two-part rap album."
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