Michael J. Fox Gets a New Comedy: Has NBC Found a Way to Make Some Progress?
NBC is in need of a stroke of luck. They need something to work. The Olympics are over; it hasn’t appreciably changed anything yet, and there’s certainly no swell of excitement about Animal Practice and Go On that leads me to believe previewing them during the Olympics will make them hits any more than that strategy usually does.
They need something to work - not something critically beloved and frustratingly little-watched, like the quirky Thursday comedies they’ve kept alive despite low ratings. They need something to hit broadly, for a lot of people, for traditional comedy audiences that like traditional television comedy. And they’d prefer to do it without seeming like they were going for the least common denominator.
It was announced yesterday that in the fall of 2013, they’re going to offer those traditional comedy audiences a new show starring Michael J. Fox. And according to Vulture, they went to pretty great lengths to make the deal, including committing to the show before anybody even shot the pilot. The show will reportedly feature Fox as a dad and, it seems, will incorporate his Parkinson’s.