Will Ferrell donned a red security guard coat – complete with a namebadge reading "Ted Vagina" – at last night's Lakers game and proceeded to usher Shaquille O'Neal out of the arena. He doesn't need to explain why; he's Will Ferrell.
Already a podcast mogul and a geek culture demi-god, Chris Hardwick can now add "America's best weatherman" to his jam-packed resumé.
Dancing with the Stars contestant Adam Carolla just got a new job as a Fox News contributor, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The podcaster has appeared infrequently on Fox News in the past, but now, he'll be making a weekly appearance on The O'Reilly Factor just like fellow comedian-turned-pundit Dennis Miller, who's had a segment called "Miller Time" on The Factor for the past five years. Carolla will be doing his first regular O'Reilly Factor appearance on Monday evening and is expected to return to the show each Monday, in addition to contributing to other Fox News programs. Adam Carolla's political beliefs differ from those of most Fox [...]
Look at Dan-Har go. After making a deal to write a pilot script for Fox last week, Dan Harmon has agreed to write a different script for CBS. CBS? Yep, CBS. Like with Fox, the CBS script will be for multi-camera. Deadline is also reporting that he is currently at Just For Laughs looking for a comedian to possibly base a show around because he prefers to write with talent in mind. This also suggests that we're not going to see either of these shows anytime soon. It appears that Harmon got these deals off of his previous work, not off a new idea, so he has [...]
Jason Bateman is in talks to direct and star in the indie comedy Bad Words, a film about a Jason Bateman-aged fellow who enters into a children's spelling bee and befriends a young Indian contestant and a female reporter. This would be Bateman's first film in the director's chair. He did, however, direct the "Afternoon Delight" episode of Arrested Development and the episode of Family Matters in which Steve invents a fat compressing machine to help his Aunt Oona impress a hunky reverend. This would also likely be Bateman's first spelling bee, considering as a child actor he probably missed out on all common human kid things.
Megan Ganz, a longtime Community writer who joined the show in season two and stayed on for the yet-to-air post-Dan Harmon fourth season, announced via a letter to Reddit today that she has left the show to take a new job on Emmy juggernaut Modern Family. Season 4 of Community has already wrapped production, but it's still all being edited together and finished up. Ganz wrote two of Season 4's upcoming 13 episodes, entitled "Paranormal Parentage" and "Advanced Introduction to Finality" (the final episode of the season), and she mentions in her Reddit letter that she still has to return to Community's production offices to oversee editing on that [...]
Longtime Conan writer Brian McCann has just been hired as the head writer for the upcoming late night series The Nikki and Sara Show, comedian Sara Schaefer tells us. Hosted by Schaefer and Nikki Glaser from the popular podcast You Had to Be There, The Nikki and Sara Show is set to debut next year on MTV. Emmy winner McCann spent 17 years writing for Conan, from 1995 until this past August. At Conan, McCann helped to define the show's sensibility and played some of its more memorable characters, like Preparation H Raymond, the FedEx Pope, and Mick Ferguson, The Guy Who's Awfully Proud of His Bulletproof [...]
Neil Casey, one of the best, if not the best, improvisor in New York right now, just got hired to be a writer at SNL. He'll be joining fellow UCB NY'er Josh Patten there, although he'll be writing sketches while Josh is writing for Weekend Update.
You may recognize Neil from a number of web videos, including current Above Average series "Belle and Bernice: Livin' in the City":
- After being replaced by T.J. Miller on The Goodwin Games, Jake Lacy has been added as a series regular to The Office. He is the second young new hire, after Clark Duke, that seems like a good fit for the rumored reboot.
- Aasif Mandvi is going to co-star in the Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson comedy The Internship (aka "Workplace Crashers") as the man in charge of the internship that Vaughn and Wilson are a part of.
- In other Daily Show correspondent castings, Dan Bakkedahl will play a rival DEA agent in the Sandra Bullock-Melissa McCarthy buddy copy film, The Heat.
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Joining new Community showrunners David Guarascio and Moses Port on the shortlist of comedy writers taking high-profile jobs that have them facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles right off the bat is Men in Black 3/Tropic Thunder screenwriter Etan Cohen, who's been hired to take over writing duties on Ghostbusters 3 from Office writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg. Maybe he will be able to crack this uncrackable nut, crafting the perfect script that gets Bill Murray on board, lives up to the original, and satisfies even the most internet-inflamed fanboy. Or it'll be another few years of rumors and infighting that'll result in either a cancelled project or a [...]
A couple of promotions in Colbert Nation this week. Barry Julien, the supervising producer and head writer for The Colbert Report has been promoted to co-executive producer, while staff writer Opus Moreschi (pictured) has taken Julien's place as head writer. Moreschi, a writer/performer who's an alumnus of iO West and UCB LA, has been with The Report since 2008. Julien, a Canadian TV writer and former teen standup, has been writing for the show since 2007 and was promoted to head writer in 2009. Host Stephen Colbert has the highest title attainable on The Colbert Report, so, unlike these guys, he won't be getting a promotion anytime soon. That [...]
Max Landis, who wrote the found footage sci-fi hit Chronicle, is set to direct his first movie, Me Him Her, a comedy about three friends in Los Angeles going through a quarter-life crisis, with at least one of them struggling with their sexual identity. Variety reports that the film will start production next spring or summer and has described it as "Reality Bites on acid." Landis, the son of famed director John Landis (Animal House, Blues Brothers, Trading Places), says Me Him Her is "totally insane! The devil is in it." It's just one of about a dozen movies Max Landis has set up right now. Comedy-wise, [...]
Josh Patten, UCB mainstay and recent focus of our Follow Friday feature, was just hired as a Weekend Update writer at SNL. If you've been following him on Twitter, this should not be a great surprise to you: the guy is a monster of a joke writer. Presumably more hires will be coming in the very near future, both in the writers room and in the cast, as the new season is set to premiere on September 15th — the wheels are definitely in motion. In any case, congrats to Josh!
Harvard Sailing Club's Chris Smith has been cast as the lead in the new CBS single-cam pilot, Ex-Men. He'll play a young dude who is taken under the wing of a bunch of old dudes. Chris recently co-starred in CBS's last single-cam pilot, Nick Stoller's failed Entry Level. Ex-Men was created by How I Met Your Mother executive producer Rob Greenberg.
Speaking of How I Met Your Mother, Kat Foster is joining the cast of Goodwin Games, the new FOX sitcom from HIMYM's creators. She will be playing Lucina, the attractive minister at the Goodwin's church, who Scott Foley's character once dumped. She is replacing Felisha Terrell, who was originally cast [...]
