ABC is piloting a new Alzheimer’s comedy starring and exec produced by Ty Burrell. The project, which comes from Punky Brewster duo Eugene Garcia-Cross and Robin Shorr, is now moving forward.
Kaitlin Olson is set to lead the drama pilot at ABC based on the French detective series HPI, Variety has learned. In addition, Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars, Party Down) has signed on to serve as showrunner while Alethea Jones (Dollface, Shining Vale) will direct and executive produce the pilot.
Exclusives
CBS has ordered pilots for a new iteration of Matlock starring Kathy Bates and a spinoff of The Good Wife starring Carrie Preston. The Good Wife spinoff is titled Elsbeth, named after Preston’s character Elsbeth Tascioni whom she played on both The Good Wife and streaming series The Good Fight.
CBS has given a pilot order to The Never Game, a drama series adaptation of Jeffery Deaver’s novel, starring and executive produced by This is Us star Justin Hartley. The project, which received a pilot production commitment in September 2021, comes from director Ken Olin and 20th Television.
With just two months to go before networks unveil their fall TV offerings to Madison Avenue during their annual upfronts presentations, broadcast pilot orders have fallen to perhaps the lowest level in decades. Fox isn’t even producing a pilot at this point, having passed on the only one it had in contention. So far, the five broadcast networks have ordered 35 pilots — some of them holdovers from last season. The tally is running more than 20% behind the 45 broadcast pilot orders last year and well below the 60 ordered in 2020.
The pandemic has drastically changed the way ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and The CW approach development — and spending, with the five networks shifting to more of a year-round development model as the days of producing nearly 100 combined pilots have come and gone.
Executive producer, writer and director Kay Oyegun is behind an untitled drama about a group of therapists who work together at a practice in Philadelphia. Co-exec producers and writers David Windsor and Casey Johnson, meanwhile, are penning a comedy titled Not Dead Yet, about a woman who gets a new lease on life after finding a job writing obituaries. Both shows come from Disney’s 20th Television, which produces This Is Us.
ABC is planning a spinoff of The Rookie with Niecy Nash set to star. The new show will be introduced in a two-episode backdoor pilot during The Rookie’s current fourth season. While the mothership show focuses on the LAPD, the potential new show would focus on the FBI.
The CW is taking another swing at a Supernatural spinoff. The network’s first pilot orders of the 2022 cycle include The Winchesters, a Supernatural prequel following the parents of Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam (Jared Padalecki) in the long-running series that concluded in 2020. The network has also ordered a pilot for Walker: Independence, a prequel to Padalecki’s current series, and Gotham Knights, a DC Comics show from three Batwoman writers. Additionally, The CW has ordered six more scripts for a Zorro drama that counts Robert Rodriguez among its executive producers.
During the holiday break, which traditionally shuts down Hollywood for the final two weeks of the year, top broadcast network executives used to spend a significant portion of their time reading pilot scripts before kicking off pilot pickups at the start of January with early drama standouts. Broadcast business traditions, already threatened by the fast evolving marketplace with the rise of streamers, have been completely upended by the pandemic. Three weeks into the new year, we’ve only had three January pilot pickups: NBC dramas Quantum Leap and Found and ABC comedy Josep.
Scott Bakula may be involved in project, which is set 30 years after the original series. (Photo courtesy Everett Collection)
The youth-skewing broadcaster has handed pilot orders to three projects: Ava DuVernay’s superhero drama Naomi, the live-action reboot of The Powerpuff Girls and a millennial nun dramedy exec produced by Jennie Snyder Urman. The network has also ordered a reboot of classic sci-fi drama The 4400 straight-to-series.
The drama has received its second pilot order in as many years at the Disney-owned broadcaster.
CBS is one of the networks that believes in the traditional pilot season. But the COVID-19 pandemic forced it to pivot and hand out a handful of straight-to-series orders for the 2020-21 season including The Equalizer, starring Queen Latifah, and Silence of the Lambs sequel Clarice (above). As this year’s development season continues to be interrupted by the pandemic, the network is considering doing the same again.
Demi Lovato is eyeing her first series-regular TV gig since her Disney Channel days. NBC has given a put pilot commitment to Hungry, a single-camera comedy in which “friends who belong to a food issues group help each other as they look for love, success and the perfect thing in the fridge that’s going to make it all better.”
The network, which has a coronavirus-proof fall schedule, will aim to film its four dramas and two comedies as soon as it’s safe to do so.
The network is picking up the cast options for the five projects that it has committed to producing this year through to Sept. 30. They are dramas Rebel, starring Katey Sagal and Andy Garcia and Delroy Lindo’s Harlem’s Kitchen, as well as comedies Bossy, which was formerly known as Kids Matter Now, Topher Grace’s Home Economics and Work Wife. Rolled over into next year’s development season are Adopted, National Parks Service, which was formerly known as ISB and Triage.
With 11 of 12 pilots unable to complete production before the novel coronavirus forced production to shut down across the industry, NBC has opted to adopt a staggered schedule for its 2020 slate and has identified five that it will film this season.
The 2020 pilot season has remained unfinished business, with pilots ordered but not filmed. And yet, under most extraordinary circumstances, amid a global pandemic that has upended the lives of millions and thrown most industries, including Hollywood, into chaos, it was almost business as usual in the month of May, with three of the five broadcast networks picking up new series out of the pool of pilot orders.
This year, there is no pilot production or testing, there actually isn’t much of anything typically associated with pilot season besides the panic, which has been setting in — and growing — as the coronavirus pandemic rages on. Over the past month and a half, pilot season has been suspended, and upfront presentations have been canceled. Yet, we could somehow potentially end up in a quasi-normal situation, with the broadcast networks making new series orders in May.
The ongoing coronavirus health crisis is giving broadcast pilot season a jolt that might be felt long after the global pandemic is over. Following the unprecedented Hollywood shutdown over the COVID-19 outbreak, which left all but one broadcast pilot in limbo, the networks have ordered at least one backup script each for almost all of their projects.
