News & Politics

Carol Leonnig’s Secret Service Book Could Become a TV Show

“Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service” will be shopped to networks.

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Washington Post writer Carol Leonnig’s best-selling 2021 book Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service might be coming to television, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Leonnig, former Legendary Entertainment CEO Thomas Tull, and producer Bobby Cohen will serve as executive producers for the potential series. 

The book by the national investigative reporter was released in May and chronicles the highs and lows of the Secret Service, from a drunken night out the day before the Kennedy assassination through the attack on the Capitol this past January. Leonnig has covered the Secret Service frequently over the course of the last decade and won a Pulitzer Prize for that reporting in 2015. 

Zero Fail has earned impressive reviews, with Rachel Maddow calling it “one of those books that will go down as the seminal work—the determinative work—in this field.” Leonnig is also the co-author, with the Post’s Philip Rucker, of A Very Stable Genius and I Alone Can Fix It, which came out last month.

So what would a Zero Fail TV series be about? There’s no word yet, so it could be anything from a docuseries that follows the timeline of the book, to a fictional crime drama (CSI: USSS?), to a sitcom starring—hey, why not?—Joel McHale as a bumbling Secret Service agent. 

Jason Fontelieu
Editorial Fellow