Paramount+ has handed out a straight-to-series order for Discretion, an eight-episode legal thriller produced by A24 with Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning starring and executive producing.
The show centres on Lenny, a summer associate at a prestigious Dallas law firm who uncovers a web of NDAs concealing a deeply troubling secret at the heart of the institution.
When Lenny realises she has signed the same agreement herself, her discoveries put her directly in the crosshairs of the firm’s most powerful female partner, Sharon, played by Kidman.
The dynamic between the two women forms the emotional core of the series, transforming what begins as a mentor-protégé relationship into something far more dangerous and morally complicated.
The show poses a central question that resonates well beyond the walls of any fictional law firm: who gets to keep secrets, and at what cost?
Production is already underway, with Stephan James and Colton Ryan recently added to the cast, and Matt Shakman directing the first four episodes of the series.
The show is currently scheduled for a 2027 premiere on Paramount+, giving the production team time to deliver what is shaping up to be a meticulously crafted legal drama.
Discretion is based on a short story by Chandler Baker, who is also writing and executive producing the television adaptation, bringing considerable real-world authority to the project.
Baker practiced law for a decade as a corporate attorney and, by her own account, spent that time negotiating “hundreds of NDAs a year” before turning to fiction writing full-time.
She is perhaps best known for Whisper Network, her 2019 bestseller about the informal warning systems women build when formal institutional channels have been effectively silenced by legal paperwork.
The novel drew directly on Baker’s professional experience and established her as a sharp and incisive voice on the intersection of workplace power, gender, and legal accountability.
Her background lends Discretion a credibility that purely fictional treatments of Biglaw culture often struggle to achieve, grounding the thriller’s darker turns in recognisable institutional reality.
The show arrives at a moment of sustained public interest in how non-disclosure agreements function as tools of concealment within powerful organisations, particularly in professional services.
Biglaw firms have long operated within a culture where confidentiality is both a professional obligation and, critics argue, a mechanism for suppressing accountability and protecting the powerful.
By framing that tension through the eyes of a junior associate navigating her first summer at a top firm, Discretion offers a perspective that is both intimate and structurally revealing.