With network upfronts just next week, this would normally be the time when said networks started picking up new shows and canceling old ones willy-nilly. Except… that’s not really happening just yet, as NBC seems intent on continuing the sweet agony of fans of such diverse programming as Parks & Recreation (expected to return), Community (expected to… well, flip a coin), Whitney (see above), and, uh, Celebrity Apprentice (again, flip that coin) for as long as it possibly can before its Monday upfront when it will announce its fall schedule. ABC, which goes on Tuesday and hasn’t picked anything up yet, is in a similar situation, while CBS is petting a cat, fondling its piles of cash, and cackling maniacally.
There was some news happening Wednesday, however, mostly from Fox. So let’s break it down.
• After picking up just five new series last season—The Mindy Project (returning), Ben And Kate (canceled), Goodwin Games (yet to debut), The Following (returning), and The Mob Doctor (canceled)—Fox nearly doubled that amount by picking up nine new series yesterday, including four dramas and five comedies. The comedies boast impressive pedigrees, for the most part, while the dramas… well, one has robots and Minka Kelly in it, so we’ve got that going for us. The dramas include Almost Human, a cop drama about police officers paired with highly realistic androids from J.J. Abrams and Fringe’s J.H. Wyman; Gang Related, a cop drama (sensing a pattern?) where the cop pairs up with a former gang member; Rake, an adaptation of the acclaimed Australian legal drama about an antiheroic attorney starring Greg Kinnear; and Sleepy Hollow in which a time-traveling Ichabod Crane (no, seriously) is pulled into our world where he must team up with a police… oh, goddammit. The comedies, meanwhile, include Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the new Andy Samberg-starring workplace cop comedy from Parks & Recreation’s Michael Schur and Dan Goor; Enlisted, a comedy about brothers in the Army from Cougar Town co-creator Kevin Biegel; Surviving Jack, a ‘90s-set sitcom that’s based on a book by Justin Halpern and features actor Chris Meloni and the other Cougar Town co-creator Bill Lawrence as showrunner; Us & Them, a remake of British series Gavin & Stacey starring Jason Ritter and Alexis Bledel as a newly dating couple; and the already picked-up Seth MacFarlane produced series Dads, which is about dads. So four shows about cops, at least one with time travel, and one with robots. Sounds about right for Fox. You can read more about the comedies here and the dramas here, courtesy of the Hollywood Reporter.
• NBC canceled Deception, its Revenge wannabe about a woman infiltrating a rich family she had once lived among when her mother was employed by the family in some capacity. You probably forgot Deception existed, but now it’s been canceled, so no one will remember it until five years from now, when someone in a comments section asks how NBC could have ever canceled this show, because it was so awesome. NBC also told a bunch of pilots that they weren’t going forward, but since those shows never existed, we won’t belabor what they were. Deadline has more information.
• Meanwhile, Deadline also reported that CBS is “very close” to a pickup of Chuck Lorre’s latest, Mom, which stars Anna Faris. Granted, the site said it would be picked up yesterday, and that didn’t happen, but we’re mostly just reporting on it because, c’mon. Is CBS really going to pass up a Chuck Lorre sitcom? Since Lorre has three other shows—Two And A Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, and Mike & Molly—airing on the network (and picked up for next season), expect at least one magazine or entertainment site with a graphics department to draw up a cartoon of a Mt. Rushmore featuring the visages of Ashton Kutcher, Jim Parsons, Melissa McCarthy, and Anna Faris to point to Lorre’s dominance of the network and the modern multi-camera sitcom landscape.
Stay tuned to The A.V. Club for all of your pickups and cancellation news, because why would you ever leave?