John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the team behind the recent Ed Helms-led Vacation movie—or the guys who wrote The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, if you’re feeling mean—have sold a new series about sad adults fighting a teenage street gang to Fox. The new series doesn’t have a title yet (although Get Off My Lawn is just sitting there, like pristine Kentucky bluegrass growing in the warm September sun), but it’s been pitched as a single-camera comedy about underdogs stepping up to fight the odds (and also some ferocious young adults).
Daley and Goldstein have established themselves as a fiscally solid screenwriting team in recent years, penning the Horrible Bosses films and the second Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. (Interestingly, their first collaboration was also doing television writing for Fox, with the pair scripting an episode of Daley’s acting alma mater, Bones.) That reputation lead to the two recently being tapped for their biggest writing gig yet, the script for the latest Spider-Man reboot. They’ve apparently taken time out from that, though, to pitch this new series, which is being described as “a mix of adrenaline and heart.” Which sounds nice, until you remember that mixing adrenaline and hearts is pretty much how you get the overdose scene from Pulp Fiction, which sounds like a hard sell for a primetime network comedy.