David Spade is bringing Joe Dirt back — this time as an animated series in development at Fox, 25 years after the original film hit cinemas in 2001. Deadline reported the project exclusively on 6 August 2026.

Spade will voice the title character and executive produce. The series is written by Scott Gairdner, whose credits include creating Comedy Central's Moonbeam City, writing for Fox's HouseBroken, and serving as executive producer on Kyle Mooney's Saturday Morning All Star Hits! for Netflix. Gairdner also directed Conan O'Brien's cold opens and pre-taped segments for the 2025 and 2026 Academy Awards, as well as Nikki Glaser's pre-taped material for the 2026 Golden Globe Awards.

The show is co-produced by Sony Pictures Television and Fox Entertainment. Spade's fellow executive producers are Fred Wolf, Gairdner, and Doug Robinson and Lauren Moffat of Sony TV-based Doug Robinson Productions. Robinson was previously head of TV for Adam Sandler's Happy Madison, which produced the original Joe Dirt film and its 2015 sequel. Wolf co-wrote the 2001 Columbia comedy with Spade Variety, 2000.

In the animated series, Joe Dirt is married with three teenage daughters and still in love with Brandy — the character played by Brittany Daniel in the 2001 film. The project is based on that Columbia picture, which followed a lovable, mullet-wearing janitor on a cross-country search for the parents who abandoned him at the Grand Canyon as a child.

This is not the first time Sony TV has tried to animate the property. A previous animated take was set up at TBS in 2010, written and executive produced by Spade, Wolf, and Donick Carey. That version did not move forward.

The Joe Dirt franchise also made a quiet piece of streaming history. Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser premiered on Sony's free streaming service Crackle in 2015, making it the first movie sequel produced for a streaming platform Deadline.

For fans, the new project means the character's story gets another chapter — and a new format. Whether the animated series makes it from development to a series order — meaning Fox commits to producing episodes — has not yet been decided. Development is the stage where a network funds a script and a creative team, with no guarantee of a full series.