Good news continues to trickle in about the networks’ fall pilot season. In addition to new shows from Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Casey Wilson and June Raphael, we can now look forward to four more pilot-ordered or greenlit series from women showrunners: a lesbian-themed sitcom produced by Ellen DeGeneres, a rare Asian American-led show from Nahnatchka Khan, a serialized rom com, and another “wife” show, this time about astronauts’ spouses.
— Ellen DeGeneres will work with openly gay 2 Broke Girls writer Liz Feldman to create NBC’s One Big Happy. The Hollywood Reporter describes the show as centering on “a lesbian who gets pregnant just as her straight male best friend meets and marries the love of his life.” DeGeneres and Feldman previously worked together on the former’s eponymous sitcom Ellen.
— Nahnatchka Khan has two shows slated for fall. The most recently approved is ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat, an adaptation of “bad-boy chef” Eddie Huang’s memoir of his immigrant childhood. (ABC was also home to Margaret Cho’s ill-fated All-American Girl, but thankfully, the TV landscape today is much kinder to Asian American actors and characters.) Khan’s other show, Fox’s Fatrick, deals with a formerly fat man (Zach Cregger) still suffering from the trauma of being taunted for his weight as a child.
— Since the big-screen romantic comedy is mostly dead, TV has taken up the mantle of the meet-cute. Jackie and Jeff Filgo have developed the marriage-themed Save the Date for CBS, which “centers on Kate, 35 and newly single, who drunkenly books a wedding venue and now is faced with the task of meeting the right man in time,” according to Deadline. The show should pair well with the thematically similar How I Met Your Dad from Carter Bays, Craig Thomas, and Emily Spivey.
— Why the word “wives” is such catnip to TV execs, I’ll never understand. Presumably closer to Army Wives than Mob Wives or Football Wives or Trophy Wife, Stephanie Savage’s Astronaut Wives Club will take place during the Mad Men era and focus on “the real story of the women who stood beside some of the biggest heroes in American history during the height of the space race,” per THR. It’s certainly a fascinating era for space exploration and for women, but it’s hard not to wish that we could get more shows where the female characters do something cool and revolutionary and amazing instead of simply being married to men who do those things.
