New Mary Poppins Live-Action Series Reimagines Classic

Think you know Mary Poppins? Think again. A new live-action television series is quietly moving through development that aims to pry open the shadowed corners of P.L. Travers’ eight novels — the ones that inspired, but never fully matched, the sunny notes of the Disney musical.

Tom Winchester is shepherding the project for Pure Fiction Television, with backing from See-Saw Films — the company behind Slow Horses and Heartstopper — and talent agency Hamilton Hodell. The team has secured adaptation rights from the Travers estate and is beginning conversations with producers. Talks with Disney, according to sources, are still at an early stage; legally the series doesn’t require Disney’s blessing, yet developers hope the studio will lend its decades of Mary Poppins experience to the table.

Why go back to the books? Because Travers’ Mary is not the prim, perfectly cheerful nanny many remember from the 1960s Julie Andrews classic. She is cryptic. Unsettling at times. Capable of mischief that borders on menace. The episodes in Travers’ cycle slip between the whimsical and the surreal; some pages are as eerie as they are enchanting. The new series reportedly plans to lean into those darker, stranger beats — to show audiences facets of the character and her world that the Disney film smoothed over.

That’s fertile ground for television. A serialized format allows slower-building mysteries, recurring nightmares that feel like memories, and tonal shifts that can move from playful to uncanny in a single scene. It could also reshape public memory of a beloved icon: not to erase Andrews’ performance, but to complicate it.

The history between Travers and Disney is part of the story. The author famously criticized the 1964 musical for its liberties, and she remained protective of her creation. Disney later produced a 2018 follow-up, Mary Poppins Returns, starring Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda and directed by Rob Marshall — another creative take that kept the character alive in popular culture.

For now, the project is at the stage of pitches and early attachments. No deals are signed. No cast announcements have been made. But the prospect of a book-faithful, moodier Mary Poppins landing on television is enough to stir curiosity: will producers fully embrace Travers’ more ambiguous imagination, or will they steer toward a middle ground that reassures family audiences? Keep watching — the next scene is still being written.