Amy Poehler is on a roll and has sold her third comedy of the season through her company Paper Kite, THR reports.
She’ll be teaming with Claudia Lonow for an “Odd Couple”-inspired series called “Family Style,” which has landed at ABC with a script with penalty commitment.
The project, a single-camera comedy, is described by THR as “a multi-generational half-hour about two mismatched men from different cultures who find love in a family-run restaurant in Miami.”
Poehler has scored a string of lucrative deals this year. First there was her multi-year deal that includes scripted and unscripted programming at NBC/Universal and at the newly formed unscripted off-shoot Universal TV Alternative Studio. The first project for that deal is a scripted comedy titled “The Baby,” which will star Sean William Scott as “the youngest male in an organized crime family made up entirely of women. Though he’s tough at work, his mother and seven older sisters mercilessly push him around at home.”
Earlier this year, Poehler and Natasha Lyonne snagged the rights for a television adaptation of Talya Lavie’s Tribeca-winning debut film “Zero Motivation.” And just last month Poehler landed a deal to produce an as-yet-unnamed pilot that will bring comedy legend Carol Burnett back to television.
In other network TV deal news, The CW has put a drama from “Dexter” executive producer Lauren Gussis into development. The series, titled “Insatiable,” was written by Gussis and, as Deadline writes, “was inspired by real-life southern lawyer and top beauty pageant coach Bill Alverson, who recently toplined his own TLC reality series, ‘Coach Charming.’ The drama focuses on a disgraced, dissatisfied civil lawyer-turned-beauty pageant coach who takes on a vengeful, bullied teenager as his client, and has no idea what he’s about to unleash upon the world.”
Like Poehler, Gussis has also made a number of deals this year. She’s got a procedural at CBS called “Body Politic” in the works, and “Chippendales” at TNT.
Women are scoring more and more development deals in television this year thanks to awareness of inequality in Hollywood. Let’s hope the trend continues and also seeps into the filmmaking world.
