Bill Lawrence addiction is becoming an increasingly prevalent and pressing problem in the TV industry, as a growing number of studios seem to find themselves nigh-constantly jonesing for Lawrence’s Doozer production studio and its ability to blend the serious and the silly. HBO most recently let this Bad Monkey climb on its back with Rooster, its recent Steve Carell-fronted version of a somewhat standard Lawrence midlife crisis show. Now, Deadline reports that the studio has gone back for another hit, this time for Emily Kapnek’s Alan Opts Out, a new TV series that Lawrence is shepherding onto screens.
Written and developed by Kapnek, who’s working from Courtney Maum’s recent novel of the same name, Alan definitely sounds like the sort of project Lawrence would hop aboard for: The series centers on the aforementioned Alan, a “powerful advertising executive” who botches a huge pitch for milk and decides to drop out of modern society, moving into a playhouse in his backyard and becoming determined to “live off the land of his suburban Connecticut home.” This whimsical rejection of the strictures of modern living then inspires other people to have similar revelations while also pissing off his wife, and, hey, there you go: Season one arc all nicely charted out.
Kapnek is, of course, a veteran TV creator in her own right, having come up in animation with shows like Nickelodeon’s As Told By Ginger before hopping over to live-action with series like Suburgatory and Selfie. She’s been largely absent from the TV scene since 2019, when her series Splitting Up Together went off the air, although she’s reportedly been working on a new animated series for Disney+, Rhona Who Lives By The River.
Produced under his overall deal with Warner Bros. Television, Alan Opts Out will be, by our best count, the sixth ongoing series Lawrence has his name attached to at the moment—and that only counts the ones that have actually had episodes come out, with a number of future projects also siting on his slate. Dude’s busy, is all we’re saying—the sort of workload that would make a character in a Bill Lawrence show look at their life and maybe do some whimsical reinvention, but which seems, in Lawrence’s case, to only make him excited to make even more TV shows.
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