NBC asks Susan Sarandon to move in with its struggling comedy lineup

By Sean O'Neal | October 14, 2013 | 10:08pm

Aux Features TV

As part of a continued comical mismatch involving big-name celebrities—one that’s inspired more laughter than its actual shows with that premise—NBC has ordered yet another sitcom based around getting a famous person on its network, this time Susan Sarandon. Like they've done before in The Banger Sisters, the real-life mother-daughter duo of Sarandon and Eva Amurri Martino will play a fictional mother-daughter duo in Growing Ivy, in which Martino’s overachieving career woman, coincidentally named Ivy, decides to remedy her messy personal life and estranged relationship with her “freewheeling, eccentric” mother, in the only way sitcom characters and struggling networks know how: by asking Susan Sarandon to move in, so they can work on their feelings and, amid that process, so both Ivy and NBC can “potentially find love."

Martino came up with the concept herself, and she’ll write the pilot alongside Will McCormack, who will also executive produce alongside Rashida Jones, in what seems like the seventh or thirteenth project that duo will have on the air next year. And like her character, Martino will be doing it all with her mother—which is enough for NBC to give Growing Ivy a pilot production commitment, as it continues to try remedying its own problems by asking famous people to move in with it.