Fox is expanding its comedy offerings.
The network has picked up six episodes of single-camera comedy Weird Loners and ordered three additional half-hour pilots, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. All three projects are being approached with an eye toward series production.
Weird Loners is the story of four relationship-phobic people who are unexpectedly thrust into each other’s lives and form an unlikely bond in a Queens, New York townhouse. Michael Weithorn will pen the script and executive produce the 20th Century Fox entry alongside Jake Kasdan.
On the pilot side, the network has added multicamera half-hour Sober Companion and single-camera entry Dead Boss.
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Sober Companion centers on a charming, but self-destructive attorney who finds his world turned upside down when a court-appointed, and highly unconventional, sober companion takes control of his life.
David S. Rosenthal and Jennie Snyder Urman penned the script and will executive produce the CBS Television Studios entry.
Dead Boss is based on the British series created by Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh and described as a comedic mystery that finds overachiever Helen Stephens wrongfully convicted of murdering her boss and forced to rely on her train wreck of a sister to prove her innocence.
Horgan and Walsh will executive produce alongside Aaron Kaplan and Patricia Breen, who will pen the script for the Warner Bros. Television and Kaptial Entertainment effort.
The network also lifted the cast contingency on comedy Here's Your Damn Family -- aka the untitled Ricky Blitt comedy from exec producer Steve McPherson and Johnny Galecki, tapping Jane Kaczmarek to star in the lead. The ICM and Greenlight Management-repped actress w ill play Carol Gordon, a single mother for two decades of a son, Richard, who is pushing 30 and still lives at home and has no plans to leave. She's described as a warm, attractive, bright, witty and principled woman who's a little insecure when it comes to the opposite sex -- almost forgetting, after all these years, just how great a catch she really is.
The pilots join Fox's Tina Fey entry Cabot College and Fatrick at the network. The news comes after Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly noted the network would shift toward producing fewer pilots but more projects with an eye toward series consideration.
E-mail: Lesley.Goldberg@THR.com
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