New Girl creator Liz Meriwether has a new comedy in the works at Fox that sounds an awful lot like a show that’s been in development at NBC for over two months. Yesterday, Variety broke the news that Fox has given a pilot production commitment to a single-cam comedy from Meriwether called Thin Ice, which she co-wrote with Ed Macdonald and Mark Grimmer. Fox exec David Madden calls the project “fresh and distinctive†and says it “takes place in a world that half-hour television has never touched,†but it sounds nearly identical to another show by Bob’s Burgers writers Steven Davis and Kelvin Yu that went into development at NBC back in September.
Here’s the logline for Meriwether’s Thin Ice from Variety:
Thin Ice centers on a woman who reclaims her dreams when she finds herself at the end of the earth — in Antarctica — surrounded by a group of brilliant misfits.
And here’s the logline from Deadline’s report about the previously announced NBC show by Bob’s Burgers writers Steven Davis and Kelvin Yu:
The project follows Nora, a young researcher who travels to the extreme environment of Antarctica with big plans but is surprised to find she’ll need a different kind of survival skills to navigate the eccentric people who live and work in this office space at the end of the world.
The NBC show is still in development, and Meriwether’s Fox show is reportedly “being put on the fast-track†for an early 2017 debut. May the best show about a woman who moves to Antarctica win?