While much of Hollywood is currently focused on giving or receiving accolades for the accomplishments of last year, the impatient visionaries at TBS are lining up the nominees of the future. For it was less than a year ago that Kevin Reilly, president of TBS and TNT, promised the kind of “awesomely in-your-face and effortlessly diverse programming” that people who seek out Big Bang Theory and Law & Order reruns presumably crave. To that end, the network has greenlit the Wyatt Cenac-led alien abduction show it picked up last May from The Office (U.S. edition) creator Greg Daniels, Conan O’Brien, and Conan producer Jeff Ross.
In a press release issued on Thursday, TBS announced it had ordered 10 episodes of People Of Earth (née The Group), with the premiere date forthcoming. The new comedy will star Cenac as Ozzie, a skeptical journalist who‘s trying to get to the bottom of the tales of abduction by extraterrestrial told by several residents of the small town of Beacon, which sounds like it’s a Hellmouth for this sort of thing. While investigating an alien abductee support group led by Gina (Ana Gasteyer), Ozzie‘s presented with possible evidence of his own abduction and presumably learns that the group he was trying to tear down is the very one he needs. The cast includes Alice Wetterlund, Oscar Nuñez, Nancy Lenehan, Ken Hall, with Michael Cassidy (Men At Work) set to play Ozzie’s boss, who has a big secret of his own. We’re guessing it won’t be his ability to get bizzay, consistently and thoroughly.