USA has just picked up a pilot to star former Happy Endings actress Eliza Coupe. The show, titled Benched, will follow “a dedicated, career-driven corporate attorney who has a public nervous breakdown after getting passed over for an expected promotion and finds herself working as a public defender. Her personal and professional worlds are turned upside down when she joins the ranks of the legal world’s underdogs and she quickly realizes that the law isn’t quite as fair as she once thought.†The show will be executive produced by former Party Down EP John Enbom as well as Groundlings writers and producers Michaela Watkins and Damon Jones.
It’s appropriate that Coupe should end up at USA, since there was talk that the network would pick up her former home Happy Endings after ABC cancelled it. If Benched gets picked up, it’ll join Jessica St. Clair and Lennon Parham’s new sitcom Playing House and the Denis Leary-produced Sirens, as the first new original comedies on the cable network in more than 10 years.