Netflix is developing a dark comedy called 'Toxic Moms' with Ashley Tisdale, six months after her viral essay about breaking up with one

Ashley Tisdale wrote an essay in January about breaking up with a toxic mom group. Six months later, that essay has a Netflix development deal, and the internet's collective jaw is on the floor.

Deadline reported first, on July 2, that Tisdale is executive producing a half-hour dark comedy called Toxic Moms. The Hollywood Reporter confirmed it the same day. If you followed the original saga, the title alone is doing a lot of work.

The refresher, for anyone who logged off in January

On New Year's Day, Tisdale published a personal essay in The Cut about "breaking up" with a group of new moms she had joined looking for her village. Her version: she got frozen out, right down to being excluded from a hangout planned at her own daughter's birthday party. "All of a sudden, I was in high school again, feeling totally lost as to what I was doing 'wrong' to be left out," she wrote.

The essay was a starting gun. Internet detectives immediately went to work trying to ID the moms, and speculation pointed at a circle that supposedly included Hilary Duff, Mandy Moore and Meghan Trainor. To be clear, that was internet guesswork, and Tisdale's camp said the piece was not about those women. Nobody was named in the essay itself.

Then it got spicy. Duff's husband, musician Matthew Koma, posted a parody of the article and called Tisdale "The Most Self-Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth," per Billboard's rundown. Mandy Moore and Meghan Trainor got asked about it and weighed in. A parenting essay turned into a weeks-long celebrity subtweet tournament.

What Netflix actually ordered

Here is the part that will make you laugh. According to THR, the show is a half-hour dark comedy, and the logline is a sleep-deprived new mother who joins a group of rich, aspirational moms with a dark underbelly. Which is, give or take, the plot of Tisdale's own year.

The credits are stacked. Search Party and Benefits with Friends writer Sabrina Jalees is writing and executive producing. Ali Wong, of Beef and roughly a decade of standup about the horrors and comedy of new motherhood, is also executive producing. Deadline described the project as "based on an original idea" and "informed by Tisdale's experience as a mom of two young children."

The question everyone's asking, and Netflix isn't answering

Was the essay optioned into this show, or was the show already cooking and the essay just great marketing? THR says it asked directly. Netflix and reps for Tisdale, Jalees and Wong did not answer whether the piece was optioned, whether the project predated the essay, or whether the essay inspired it.

So officially: original idea, informed by her life as a mom. Unofficially: a series about a woman iced out by a clique of brand-building rich moms, arriving six months after Tisdale wrote a viral essay about being iced out by a clique of, in her words, women "building brands, running their own companies, launching creative projects." Draw your own Venn diagram.

For Tisdale, whose recent credits include voicing a character on Disney's Phineas and Ferb and running her lifestyle brand Frenshe, it is a genuinely canny pivot. She last executive produced a scripted comedy with ABC Family's Young & Hungry, which wrapped in 2018. Turning the worst group chat of your life into a Netflix comedy is, frankly, the best revenge available to a person who cannot legally name names.

One caveat worth keeping straight: this is a series in development, not a greenlit, dated, coming-soon show. Plenty of development deals quietly die. But the pitch is loud, the producers are real, and the origin story writes itself.