ABC is cooking up another comedy project, this time with veterans Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, who are creating a single-camera series that follows a Dutch documentary filmmaker dealing with three very animated American families. The yet untitled series has already received a pilot commitment with a significant penalty, and will be produced by 20th Century FOX TV, with whom Levitan and Lloyd are tied up in a deal.
The series will be focusing on three families, two of which are very untraditional. Levitan revealed that the idea for the show came about while he was having conversations with Lloyd about “small things that were happening in our houses and lives” with their families. Both are married and have children, with Levitan having three kids aged 10-15 and Lloyd with two boys, aged 9 and 13.
Levitan adds that “We started to think this would make an interesting TV show if handled in a smart way. We thought we could do a family show but not in a way that seemed schmaltzy.”
The idea later became a full-blown series concept following three very different families. The traditional family is composed of a working father, a stay-at-home mother and their two children. The first untraditional family is comprised of a 60-year-old man who becomes a stepfather after marrying a Latina mother who is 30 years his junior. Lastly, there’s the gay couple who adopted a Vietnamese baby.
The series will be told from the point of view of the filmmaker and his camera crew. More interestingly, the filmmaker is an exchange student when he was younger, and coincidentally stayed with the family of one of the persons he is shooting. Lloyd adds that the series fits well into ABC.
"It's a family show, which they expressed interest in having," Lloyd said. "It's also offbeat and stylistically interesting and seemed like it was in their wheelhouse."
Fans of
Back to You can wait for the duo’s latest creation, which will probably hit television screens next year.
-Valerie Anne del Castillo, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source:
The Hollywood Reporter
(Photo courtesy of E! Online)