What’s the point of upfronts if all the networks are just going to announce everything the week before, all willy nilly (oddly, All Willy Nilly is also the name of a yet to be picked up CBS pilot – no it’s not)? Jealous of all the NBC bean spilling, last night, FOX announced its three new single-camera comedies for next season.
First, is Mindy Kaling’s highly anticipated It’s Messy, in which she plays a doctor trying to have it all. Besides Kaling, The Office’s Howard Klein and BJ Novak will executive produce the show (things are just looking bleaker and bleaker over in Scranton). Her co-stars – Ed Weeks, Chris Messina, Anna Camp, Zoe Jarmon and Dana DeLorenzo – are all fairly unknown but considering the talent of Kaling and how perfectly this show pairs with The New Girl, they won’t be for long.
Joining the network this fall, as well, is the The Goodwin Games, created by the guys behind How I Met Your Mother, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, with longtime HIMYM writer Chris Harris. The show was intentionally built around Becki Newton, who is currently, I guess, finishing up an arc as Barney’s stripper girlfriend on HIMYM. The show is about her character and her siblings (played by Jake Lacy and, that’s right, Scott Foley) inheriting a lot of money from their father but only if they agree to his terms, which are probably zany. Bays and Thomas are exceedingly talented writers so it’s exciting to see what they can do with their first foray into purely single-camera (HIMYM, though it has a laugh track, is shot partly in the single-camera and multi-camera style).
The last comedy is Ben & Kate, which was created by What Happens in Vegas scribe Dana Fox and stars Dakota “Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson’s Daughter†Johnson and Nat Faxon, the other guy who wrote The Descendants. Nat plays the brother who comes to help his single-mother sister, played by Dakota. I would be lying if I said this just seems like a show that won’t work, especially compared to the other two.
The odd men out was Modern Family’s Steve Levitan and his Will Forte starring comedy, Rebounding. It would be great to see Forte on TV again but so it goes. Regardless, Fox is building a pretty stacked stable of live-action sitcoms, something that couldn’t have said for many years. With these and NBC’s announcement, how excited are you for this TV season to end so the next one can start already?