“New Girl” creator Liz Meriwether has a new pilot in the works at Fox, the home of her long-running Zooey Deschanel-led sitcom. Variety reports that the network has made a pilot production commitment to a single-camera comedy created by Meriwether. “Thin Ice,” the playwright’s first comedy development since “New Girl,” 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,” Variety writes.
Meriwether co-wrote the pilot script with Ed Macdonald (“Lovesick”) and Mark Grimmer (“Medics”), and she’ll serve as executive producer alongside “New Girl’s” Katherine Pope. The project is being produced by 20th Century Fox Television.
Fox is evidently excited about “Thin Ice” — the pilot is being put “on the fast track” and is scheduled to be produced in early 2017. A cast hasn’t been assembled yet.
“Fox has been and continues to be such a great home for me with ‘New Girl.’ And now I’m looking forward to making a pilot about the sexiest place on earth — Antarctica,” Meriwether joked. “And, yes, we will be shooting on location, so I think we’re going to find a cast very soon,” she added.
“Liz is a great friend of ours, and her take on the important genre of South Pole comedy is as brilliant, specific, and hilarious as ‘New Girl,’” said David Madden, president of entertainment at Fox Broadcasting Company. “‘Thin Ice’ takes place in a world that half-hour television has never touched, and does it with original characters, an inimitable voice, and Liz-style surprising romance,” he hyped. “It’s as fresh and distinctive as anything we’ve read this year, and we’re excited to move forward with Liz and her fantastic team of Ed, Mark, and Katherine.”
Meriwether has spoken out about double standards in Hollywood. “I think there’s still this mystique… where men are afraid to write female characters, but, as a woman, I do, and I’m expected to write male characters all the time… male writers are nuclear; they can’t get their heads inside a female character,” Meriwether observed. “There’s a feeling in Hollywood of, ‘Well, women will write the women.’”
“New Girl” has received five Emmy nominations and is currently in its sixth season. The series, based on Merwether’s own experiences living with roommates she met on Craiglist, premiered in 2011, making it Fox’s longest-running live-action comedy on the air. Meriwether also wrote the screenplay for 2011’s “No Strings Attached,” a comedy about friends with benefits starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher.
