Let's hope it's not a huge mistake.
The big-network upfront schedule presentations are coming up next week, but the pickups of new series, official and reported, are starting to, well, pick up.
Fox has reportedly settled on a couple of dramas and three comedies, the latter including Running Wilde, created by Mitch Hurwitz and starring Will Arnett (and costarring Keri Russell). Arnett plays “a rich guy who has wasted his life,” says the L.A. Times—a familiar situation to anyone who saw him in Arrested Development. Its other shows, says a Variety roundup, include the dramas Lone Star and Shawn Ryan’s Ridealong, and comedies Keep Hope Alive and Traffic Light.
Meanwhile, NBC, which announced several pickups last week, added comedy Perfect Couples, about three young pairs working on their relationships. Sounds like any one of those assembly-line comedies NBC put, one after the other, into the post-Friends timeslot in the late ’90s and ’00s, but to be fair I haven’t seen a frame of it, so we’ll see. And that Rockford Files remake? Word is it kind of stunk. (But… but they had Dermot Mulroney!)
Finally, ABC picked up No Ordinary Family, with The Shield’s Michael Chiklis as the head of a family of superheroes. Who spin a web of lies to escape internal investigations after they skim money from drug busts and rip off the Armenian Money Train. (Kidding with that last sentence! I think!)