Once again proving that raising a small child is a miserable process that everyone wants to escape, it looks like Minnie Driver is casting about for things to do other than keep starring on About A Boy. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Driver has signed on to star in Happy Life for CBS.
The series, which was formerly called Joe Time (a name change that demonstrates CBS learned at least one lesson from the movie Joe Somebody), will find Driver playing the wife of Joe, a man who “struggles with the fact that everyone around him is pursuing their dreams and enjoying their lives more than he is.” (Surprisingly, the network decided to forego the title How Every Single Person On Earth Feels All The Time, Including You, There On The Couch, Watching The Seconds Tick By With Irreversible Finality.) Driver’s character Maggie is a former doctor who quit her practice to begin a new career teaching “mindful meditation” from her home studio. It seems that Joe, like most of us, will learn the valuable lesson that doing what you want is easy, as long as you already spent about twenty years sacrificing any personal life or emotional attachments in service to a job that delivered enormous financial gain.
Driver’s commitment to Happy Life is in second position, meaning that if About A Boy somehow avoids cancellation (an unlikely proposition), she would return to NBC for season three, rather than living the dream of abandoning her young child in favor of hanging out in a home studio doing meditation all day. Produced by Bill Wrubel (Modern Family) and TV superman James Burrows (who helped create Cheers and has directed episodes of almost every sitcom you liked in the past thirty years), the show would be Driver’s second time in a pilot for the network. For now, though, she will have to content herself with finishing About A Boy for the year, freed from the shackles of a small creature shrieking, “Look at me!” over and over, as NBC is wont to do.