Amy Poehler is flexing her producer’s muscles.
We announced earlier this year that the Parks and Rec star was producing Broad City, a Comedy Central vehicle for comediennes Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson.
Deadline is now reporting that Poehler has signed a three-year deal with NBC. Her first project out of the gate will be a sitcom called Old Soul starring Natasha Lyonne, who made a small comeback as one of most winsome performers on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black. (We really hope she can do both shows, because Lyonne is wonderfully wounded and droll on OITNB.) Co-created by Poehler, Old Soul has already been greenlit for a pilot.
Lyonne will play a caregiver to “a group of opinionated elderly people,” according to Deadline. An NBC exec states, “This show, hopefully, will blow up some of the cliches we think about old people…. It’s been a while since The Golden Girls gave us a funny and insightful ensemble of seniors, and I hope this show will do that too…. There’s great actors available to play roles like this. We spend a lot of time looking for 20-and 30-somethings and not that much time looking for 60-somethings. So we just thought it was a different way to go with a comedy landscape that starts to feel very familiar and homogeneous.”
Sounds like somebody’s not watching HBO’s superbly funny-sad Getting On!
Getting back to Poehler and Lyonne, though, both have done excellent work on TV, so as long as the Old Soul avoids rapping grannies, count us in.