Katharine McPhee will star in CBS’s upcoming drama Scorpion, as a diner waitress who learns to translate for an elite network of super-geniuses who are attempting to save the world. McPhee, it must be stated, will not herself star as a genius, because everyone knows that diner waitresses can’t be geniuses. But she will get as close as a lowly waitress can get—a “working-class hero” who “becomes a nanny of sorts” for the team of “socially misunderstood masterminds.”
The drama is based on the life and work of this guy, who will be played by Elyes Gabel. Eddie Kaye Thomas and Robert Patrick will also star. The pilot will be written by Nick Santora and Nicholas Wootton, who produced CBS’s mediocre Golden Boy.
Oddly, this role sounds even more demeaning than McPhee’s earlier work on Smash as the ingenue Karen Cartwright, whose girlish, sexualized innocence made her perfect for impersonating Marilyn Monroe. This time it sounds as though she’s being shoehorned into the role of love interest/mommy/caterer/rube, appearing in every scene to have things patiently explained to her and/or to be fawned over.
The Hollywood Reporter has no further information on the project, but we assume the detail where this was written from some geeky guy’s wet dream about a pretty girl who will truly understand him will emerge in the next press release.