NBC is adding to its pilot roster with orders for two comedies.
The two projects, both multi-camera comedies, bring the network’s total to eight for this season — one more than all the broadcast networks ordered last year. One, an untitled show from New 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 among 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, among them a Rockford Files reboot, as it stages a mini-revival to the once frenetic network pilot season. (ABC and CBS have each ordered two pilots so far 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 are consulting producers. The logline reads, “Ginger (Sagal) and Jill (Lynch) have always been a team as opposites that work best together. As they sort their past and look toward their future, they’ll discover that in spite of it all, they wouldn’t change a thing.”
The project comes from Paramount Television Studios, making it the first NBC pilot from an outside studio this year. 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 about a free-spirited woman and a buttoned-up professor who marry impetuously after a whirlwind courtship.” Universal Television is producing. Lerner wrote the pilot and will executive produce with Jamie Lee Curtis, Eric Tannenbaum, Kim Tannenbaum, Scott Schwartz and Lionsgate Television.
