The past few years have seen many prime-time animated series attempting to replicate The Simpsons—chief among them the latter-day Simpsons, but also some newer shows that tend to stir up more suspicion and animosity than sad, sweet charity. Now Simpsons and King Of The Hill vet Greg Daniels, who clearly has a better shot than most, will once more try his hand with a couple of new shows being developed as part of his recent overall deal with NBC, returning to real cartoons after years of dabbling in some occasionally cartoonish behavior on The Office and Parks And Recreation.
Deadline reports that Daniels is working on an animated show with Parks writer Alan Yang about a group of twentysomething dudes sharing a house in the richy-rich Los Angeles neighborhood of Hancock Park, where we can only hope their slacker, twentysomething shenanigans get on the nerves of their neighbors Kathy Bates, Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith, and/or New Kids On The Block’s Joey McIntire. And he’s also working on one with his Office collaborator Mindy Kaling, where she will write, executive produce, and voice a character in a show about a high-school girls volleyball team, a scenario that should lend itself well to Kaling’s sharp satirical eye for shallowness and trenchant comic observations about just how awful girls can be to each other. Should either show make it to air, they’d join a lineage of NBC prime-time animation that includes Stressed Eric, God The Devil And Bob, and Father Of The Pride—probably either dismaying or relieving, we’re not sure which.