It’s CBS’s turn for a flurry of renewals, pickups, and cancellations similar to those from its fellow broadcast networks that have been going down all this week. Variety reports that the all-seeing eye has ordered four new dramas and two new comedies to series. Let’s break them down, shall we?
First, there’s Wisdom Of The Crowd, the series starring Jeremy Piven as a “charismatic tech innovator” who invents a crowdsourcing app to help solve his daughter’s murder, “revolutionizing crime-solving in the process.” Yes, it’s Ari Gold from Entourage as a tech bro saving the world through apps, with an opportunity for procedural cases-of-the-week built right in. Then we’ve got Instinct, starring Alan Cumming as an ex-CIA operative turned writer and professor who’s recruited by the NYPD to help catch a serial killer. Sounds suspiciously edgy, but it’s also based on an upcoming James Patterson book. So there you go.
Moving into the “law enforcement ensemble drama” portion of the schedule, there’s S.W.A.T., starring Shemar Moore as the sergeant of a S.W.A.T. team unit in Los Angeles who’s “torn between loyalty to the streets and duty to his fellow officers.” That one’s inspired by the 2003 movie of the same name, placing it slightly ahead of the nostalgia curve. Then there’s Seal Team, a presumably pro-military drama from CBS TV that “tells the story of the professional and personal lives of the most elite unit of Navy SEALs as they train, plan and execute the most dangerous, high stakes missions our country can ask of them.“
Finally ,we’ve got a pair of sitcoms: 9JKL, an in-house production from Friends and Fresh Off The Boat producer Dana Klein and Royal Pains and Prison Break actor Mark Feuerstein based on a period in Feuerstein’s life where he lived in an apartment in the building he grew up in, flanked by his parents’ and brother’s places on either side. (Apartments J,K, and L, thus the title.) And Me, Myself & I will go high concept with three different actors playing the same person over three periods of his life: “a 14-year-old in 1991, a 40-year-old in present day, and a 65-year-old in 2042.” Bobby Moynihan will play the 40-year-old, with John Larroquette as his 65-year-old future self.