by What’s happening in the comedy world right now…
- It’s ELECTION DAY. Have you voted yet?
- In related news, Roseanne Barr — yes, Roseanne — is on the ballot as a presidential candidate in California, Colorado and Florida. She also says she’s eligible as a write-in in Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Do with that information what you will.
- Elizabeth Porter, who had worked on the Comedy Central Roasts as the cable channel’s senior VP of specials and talent devlopment, has joined RelativityREAL (part of Relativity Media) as its executive VP for development and series.
- Comedian Asif Ali has joined Dan Castellaneta and Mo Gaffney in the cast of ABC Family’s Continuing Fred pilot.
- CBS has made a deal with Hulu to license more than 2,600 episodes of past programming to Hulu Plus subscribers, beginning in January 2013.
- HBO has ordered eight episodes of the Stephen Merchant series, Hello Ladies. It’s based, in part, on the comedian’s autobiographical material explored in his 2011 stand-up tour of the same name.
- Amazon Studios is working on a pilot deal with David Javerbaum’s single-cam with 3 Arts, Browsers.
- ABC gave Bill Lawrence a put-pilot commitment for his adaptation of Feel The Force, originally a BBC2 sitcom in 2006 about two rookie female cops. Hey, wait a second. Didn’t Laura Kightlinger and Mary Lynn Rajskub just film a pilot in which they were cops?! Different lady fuzz.
- Diablo Cody also is working with ABC…her project is called Alex + Amy, and centers on a younger man (22) and older woman (if by older, you mean 32) who move in together. But how will they understand each other’s pop-culture references?!?!?
- NBC has extended deals to writer Jeff Lowell for a family comedy that flashes back to 1980 when the parents in the present were then teen-agers themselves; and to Kat Coiro for an adaptation of Sally Koslow’s book, Slouching Towards Adulthood.
