Danny Pudi and Alan Tudyk join NBC’s Powerless pilot

By Sam Barsanti  |  February 23, 2016 | 10:53pm
Aux Features TV

Yesterday, we reported that Vanessa Hudgens had been cast as the lead in Powerless, NBC’s workplace comedy pilot about insurance adjusters in the DC Comics universe. As popular as she is, though, she doesn’t really have the nerdy cachet that a project like this needs if it’s going to be a hit with the Comic-Con crowd. Luckily for NBC, the network has now managed to hire two guys whose pictures can be found in the encyclopedia entry for “nerdy cachet”: Firefly’s Alan Tudyk and Community’s Danny Pudi. They’ll be joined by A To Z’s Christina Kirk, who also doesn’t have much nerdy cachet, but at least she was on an episode of Stella. That’s good enough.

This news comes from Variety, which also has some handy descriptions of who these characters will be (spoiler alert: none of them are secretly the masked vigilante known as Batman). Pudi’s character, Teddy, will be the “best friend” and “trusted confidante” of Hudgens’ Emily, making him sort of like the Jim to her Pam. Plus, he “spends his days creating time-wasting pranks,” just in case the Jim/Pam thing wasn’t clear enough. Tudyk’s character will be the office’s new boss, a “rich, over-educated, globetrotting wastrel” who got the job because he’s the owner’s son, and Kirk’s character will be a superhero fangirl who has covered her cubicle in “beefcake shots of super guys.”

If NBC picks up Powerless, insiders say it probably shouldn’t affect Pudi’s role on Community, due to Community being dead and never coming back.

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