Whitney Cummings will explore college in the #MeToo Era for her next TV project. Deadline reports the multi-hyphenate is joining forces with “Precious” director/”Empire” co-creator Lee Daniels for an untitled Amazon comedy series investigating how political correctness, sex, race, and #MeToo play out on a contemporary college campus.
Starring Cummings, the series centers on the staff of an ombudsman’s office. Cummings’ character, the lead, “must reconcile the dissonance between different generations of feminism, and the struggle to reconcile our primal desires, and socially constructed identities with current ethical obligations regarding race, class, and gender.”
Cummings and Daniels created and wrote the project together, and the latter will helm the pilot. From Fox 21 TV Studios, the series landed at Amazon for development after a bidding war.
Cummings created and toplined “Whitney,” an NBC sitcom about a marriage-phobic woman in a long-term relationship. It ran for two seasons from 2011-2013. She co-created the long-running CBS comedy “2 Broke Girls” with Michael Patrick King of “Sex and the City” fame. The series wrapped up its sixth and final season in spring 2017. Cummings wrote for and produced both shows. She recently served as executive producer and co-showrunner on the short-lived “Roseanne” revival. She stepped down before star Roseanne Barr’s racist tweets about Valerie Jarrett and the show’s subsequent cancellation.
Released earlier this year, “The Female Brain” marked Cummings’ directorial debut. She also starred in the pic, a comedy about the effects love and sex have on neurology. Cummings adapted Louann Brizendine’s book of the same name with Neal Brennan (“Chappelle’s Show”).
“For me, the key was just writing something for myself,” Cummings told us about landing the directing gig. “I wrote the script with Neal Brennan and we hustled to get it made — if someone else had written it I would have been on a list to direct it. I have no idea how directors get hired in the studio system, so I like sticking to generating my own material so I’m not waiting around to win the lottery.”
