NBC is adding to its pilot roster with orders for 2 comedies.
The 2 projects, each multi-camera comedies, bring the network’s total to eight for this season — yet one more than all the published networks ordered last yr. One, an untitled show from Recent Adventures of Old Christine creator Kari Lizer, will star Jane Lynch and Katey Sagal. The second, Newlyweds, is from creator Gail Lerner (Will & Grace, Black-ish) and follows a later-in-life marriage.
NBC now counts three comedies amongst its pilot crop, with these two joining an untitled, single-camera show from Brooklyn Nine-Nine alumni Dan Goor and Luke Del Tredici about an L.A. private eye. The network has also ordered five drama pilots, amongst them a Rockford Files reboot, because it stages a mini-revival to the once frenetic network pilot season. (ABC and CBS have each ordered two pilots to this point this development cycle, bringing the all-network total to 12.)
The pilot starring Lynch and Sagal is loosely inspired by the real-life friendship between therapists Pepper Schwartz and Janet Lever, who’re consulting producers. The logline reads, “Ginger (Sagal) and Jill (Lynch) have at all times been a team as opposites that work best together. As they sort their past and look toward their future, they’ll discover that despite all of it, they wouldn’t change a thing.”
The project comes from Paramount Television Studios, making it the primary NBC pilot from an out of doors studio this yr. Lizer is writing and executive produces with Lynch, Sagal, and Krista Vernoff, Andrew Stearn and Alexandre Schmitt of Trip the Light Productions.
Newlyweds is “a later-in-life love story a couple of free-spirited woman and a buttoned-up professor who marry impetuously after a whirlwind courtship.” Universal Television is producing. Lerner wrote the pilot and can executive produce with Jamie Lee Curtis, Eric Tannenbaum, Kim Tannenbaum, Scott Schwartz and Lionsgate Television.