Entertainment

Barack and Michelle Obama’s Netflix projects revealed

The former president has promised the programmes will be entertaining and educational.
The former president has promised the programmes will be entertaining and educational. The former president has promised the programmes will be entertaining and educational.

Barack and Michelle Obama have unveiled a slate of projects in development for Netflix, a year after the former president and first lady signed a deal with the streaming platform.

The Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground Productions, has announced a total of seven films and series that Barack Obama said will entertain but also “educate, connect and inspire us all”.

Higher Ground is producing a feature film on Frederick Douglass, adapted from David W. Blight’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography.

Michelle Obama book tour
Michelle Obama book tour Michelle Obama (Kirsty O’Connor/PA)

It is also planning an adaptation of The New York Times Overlooked obituary column, about deaths unreported by the paper.

Netflix and the Obamas acquired the Sundance Film Festival documentary American Factory, about a Chinese-owned factory in post-industrial Ohio.

And the company’s Bloom is an upstairs-downstairs drama set in post-Second World War New York.