IFC today unveiled its development slate, made up of three pilots and eight script orders, all of them comedies. The network is set to launch a 20-episode second season of Comedy Bang Bang and new comedies Maron, The Birthday Boys, and The Spoils of Babylon later this year, and they're showing no signs of slowing down their comedy output. In addition to a pilot centered on musical comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates, IFC has ordered scripts for Stupid Life, co-created by Chris Gethard and Tom Scharpling and starring Gethard; Two Idiots, which comes from co-creator Megan Mullally and follows a pair of rich women who grew up in a [...]
The 2012 Black List was just announced yesterday, an annual ranking of the year's most popular unproduced screenplays, as voted by hundreds of film executives and compiled by Franklin Leonard. Each year, the list helps to get hard-working writers' names out there and to push some movies into production. Movies that have been in the past after first appearing on the Black List include Juno, Lars and the Real Girl, and 500 Days of Summer. Some have criticized the Black List for catering to movies that are already in development or for the list being easily manipulated by powerful agents, managers, and assistants; but despite any of those [...]
This has been a transitional season for NBC's comedy department, with the network seemingly abandoning developing hip young shows like Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, and Community to focus on more traditional, broadly-appealing sitcoms like Go On and The New Normal (with much better results, ratings-wise). NBC Entertainment Jennifer Salke spoke to TV Guide today about the changes to the network's comedy strategy:
"We just want a different brand. We don't want a narrow brand in the sense of some of those shows that we inherited here, which we're huge fans of, [but] have a very narrow audience… It would be easy if we hated those shows, but we actually [...]
"…in an increasingly noisy world of information and digital interactions, comedy can still deliver the truth in a way that captures people's attention and does so in an essentially human way. As the definition of media grows from 'news' and 'video' to anything that acts as an interface to our world (duh, medium!), comedy must follow. Given the world we live in, that means the bombardment of marketing messages we experience, all of our online and digital experiences and the physical world." - Baratunde Thurston, in a post on his blog that announces his departure from The Onion and discusses the importance of comedy in today's society.
