Sarah Hoover's bestselling memoir The Motherload is being adapted into a television drama at 20th Television. The book, which unflinches at the reality of early motherhood—the rage, the brain fog, the identity loss—will finally have the screen time it deserves.
Stuart Zicherman is attached as showrunner, with Hoover co-writing the pilot alongside Sas Goldberg, who worked on Only Murders in the Building and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The series will follow Jennifer, a millennial art dealer who discovers that motherhood bears almost no resemblance to what she imagined. Instead of the expected glow, she finds herself navigating months of rage, self-medication, and a relationship to her husband that has fundamentally fractured. The logline doesn't shy away from the core tension: "A total surrender of sex, career and identity results, and Jennifer realizes she'll never be able to find her way to fulfillment in parenthood without the hardest of looks at herself, her relationship to her own mother, to men, and to the condition of being a woman who despises bullshit mommy narratives."
Hoover herself moved from Indiana to New York to study art history, worked in galleries, and married artist Tom Sachs. When she became pregnant, her life began to unravel—a experience that became the raw material for her memoir. The book is, at its core, a refusal of the sanitized motherhood narrative. It's an unflinching examination of postpartum depression and the gap between expectation and reality.
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Start Your News DetoxWhat makes this adaptation significant is that it takes seriously what Hoover documented: that honesty about motherhood's difficulty isn't failure, it's clarity. The Gotham Group's Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Jeremy Bell are executive producing alongside Zicherman and Goldberg, both of whom have first-look deals with 20th Television.
The series is still in development, which means there's time before we see Jennifer's story on screen. But the momentum is there—a book that dared to tell the truth about motherhood is now getting the resources to reach an even wider audience.
