Amongst all the great news in TV comedy renewal land comes this unsurprising but still sad news (at least in terms of BFFs): Are You There Chelsea?, Best Friends Forever and Bent are officially not coming back to the peacock. RIP, friends.
The pilot of Bent premiered last night on NBC, and it gave me a teeny-tiny wave of deja vu that carried me back to watching another solidly mediocre NBC romantic comedy TV show. And like Free Agents, it would be my best guess that Bent is destined for cancellation sooner rather than later.
Granted, Free Agents' over-jazzed slickness and failure to characterize its protagonists are not issues for Bent. Nope, the characterizations of Pete (David Walton) and Alex (Amanda Peet) are hammered in pretty hard: she's an uptight lawyer from NorCal with a kid and an ex-husband in white collar prison; he's a man-whoring, surfing contracter from SoCal [...]
The NBC fall comedy lineup is out, and the only thing that's going to make you truly wig out 30 Rock's midseason start. However, considering that Tina Fey probably doesn't want to bring a 2-week-old infant to work, Whitney Cumming's Whitney will be rounding out the Thursday lineup until the Girlie Show gang returns. Check out all of the new comedies after the jump, and start scheduling your spare time accordingly.
BFFs got off to a slow start, ratings-wise, last night, clocking in with a 1.2 rating and 3.9 million viewers. It lost a solid portion of lead-in Betty White's Off Their Rockers audience, which managed a 1.8 with 7.1 million viewers. But it still did better than soon-to-be-cancelled Bent, which ended the night with a 0.7 rating and 2 million viewers. But it was Bent's last episode, while there are still five more weeks of new BFFs episodes to come, so we'll see if it can't improve upon this initial showing.
Jeffrey Tambor stopped by Late Night last night to promote tomorrow night's premiere of Bent on NBC, and he dropped a couple of his catchphrases from roles past. "There's always money in the banana stand." "Hey now." Unfortunately his diminutively regal character on Yo Gabba Gabba didn't seem to have a catchphrase, but it is worth appreciating all the same. He's a singing king on a tiny pillow! That is a career role!
NBC is set to pick up a whopping six new comedies for next season, virtually guaranteeing that there will be a second comedy night on the network. Here's what to look forward to:
-Up All Night: This is the much-buzzed-about "untitled Emily Spivey project," which the SNL/Parks & Rec writer is fronting with Lorne Michaels producing. It stars Christina Applegate, Maya Rudolph and Will Arnett and is "an irreverent look at parenthood through the POV of an acerbic working mother — who never thought she’d be a mom — along with her stay-at-home husband and opinionated parents."
-Free Agents: Hank Azaria will star as "a recent divorcé [...]
NBC's Bent is a pretty good show! You wouldn't know that by how NBC has treated it, however: burning through an entire six-episode season in three weeks with very little promotion. And when a show is clearly being burned off, it makes people not want to get invested in it, which makes the whole thing a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it's not all NBC's fault, at least according to this breakdown of potential justifications for the network's behavior. Basically, it would cost them a whole lot to hold it over until the summertime, or to advertise it more, and they thought it would be better for people to get [...]
Here's a bit of news buried in the Community/Parks and Rec reshuffling: NBC has lined up new mid-season sitcoms Bent and Best Friends Forever on Wednesday nights this spring, with the shows arriving on March 21 at 9pm and April 4 at 8:30pm respectively.
This will all be official come Sunday, but until then, it's hearsay aplenty. Variety is reporting that NBC is giving the greenlight to at least three new sitcoms for this fall: Whitney, Alpha Mom (formerly the untitled Emily Spivey project) and Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea. But that's not all!
