Comedy legend Carol Burnett might be making a glorious return to TV soon. According to Deadline, ABC has given a put pilot commitment to an untitled multi-camera comedy starring Burnett and co-executive produced by Amy Poehler. Written by Michael Saltzman, the project centers on “a family who gets a chance to buy the house of their dreams — a house they’d never be able to afford under normal circumstances, but is able to under extremely abnormal circumstances. They must live with the current owner, an older actress (Burnett) — until she dies.†Saltzman served as an executive producer on Murphy Brown and more recently has worked on shows like Mad Men and Halt and Catch Fire. Here’s what he told Deadline about the ABC project:
I grew up — like millions of other people — watching The Carol Burnett Show, and idolizing Carol. It wasn’t just the hilarious parodies; her Q&As just showed her to be this warm, funny, relatable person. And then the very first meeting I had when I was trying to break into television as a writer was with Carol, who was exactly the same person in real life as she was on TV. Through an incredible act of kindness and generosity, she gave me my start. In our meeting, Carol offered praise and encouragement, which by itself was amazing, but she then elevated things to a truly surreal level when she presented a check with no contract or conditions. Her only instruction was to write anything — a play, a musical, a TV show, a movie, a poem. It didn’t matter. She just wanted to give someone she believed in their start. I’d always wanted to pay her back in some way, and reward the faith she placed in me, but the stars never seemed to align.
“We watched Carol with our moms, and our moms taught us 90 percent of what we needed to know to be the kind of women that we are today, and the other 10 percent is Carol,†Poehler said on the news. “We love her and we thank her.â€