For those who enjoy the bluntly profane humor and constant soul-searching of Girls, but just wish it had fewer girls to keep track of—or more importantly, for those who enjoy Sarah Silverman—HBO has an answer. It’s picked up a comedy pilot starring Silverman as “a pathologically honest woman” in the midst of a “modern midlife crisis,” presumably stemming from the fact that nobody wants to hear the truth in these modern times. Keep that shit in the 19th century where it belongs, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The as-yet-untitled series will be written by Secret Diary Of A Call Girl’s Lucy Prebble, with Silverman executive producing. It’s definitely not the first time a TV comedy’s been built around Silverman: She followed up Comedy Central’s The Sarah Silverman Program by starring in a pilot for NBC in 2011, back when the sitcom fields bloomed with bawdy brunettes, that ended up on YouTube. And it’s definitely not the first collaboration between Silverman and HBO, which gave her some of her earliest acting jobs on The Larry Sanders Show and Mr. Show, hosted her Emmy-winning special Sarah Silverman: We Are Miracles.
Most recently, HBO developed but passed on People In New Jersey, which would have starred Silverman and Topher Grace as brother and sister. Apparently HBO would just prefer its Sarah Silverman comedies without any Topher Grace in them, which is a bit of pathological honesty that is endemic of our own modern midlife crisis.