by If you say it’s all Greek to you when it comes to figuring out how Amazon.com’s Amazon Studios would make sense of its first wave of sitcom pilots, then, well, congratulations.
Your Amazon Studios Fantasy League picks of Alpha House and Betas made it through to series!
Amazon had cultivated several pitches for both sitcoms and children’s series over the past year, put all of the produced pilots online for anyone and everyone to view and review, then made the orders official today.
Roy Price, Amazon Studios director, said: “We are thrilled at the enthusiastic customer response to our first original pilots. We built Amazon Studios so that customers could help decide which stories would make the very best movies and TV shows. It’s exciting to see the process in motion, doing exactly what we set out to do. The success of this first set of pilots has given us the push to try this approach with even more shows—this is just the beginning.”
Both sitcom pickups feature familiar names.
Alpha House — Written by Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau, Alpha House spotlights four U.S. Senators who share a rented house in Washington, D.C., played by John Goodman, Clark Johnson, Matt Malloy and Mark Consuelos.
Betas — Also about a quartet of guys. This one is written by Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard, and set in Silicon Valley. Stars Ed Begley Jr., Jon Daly, Joe Dinicol, Margo Harshman, Charlie Saxton and Karan Soni. It’ll be directed and produced by Michael Lehmann, with Alan Freedland, Alan Cohen and Michael London.
