Julius Pepperwood will live again, apparently, as NBC announced today that it’s picking up four of its recently ordered TV pilots to series—including Sunset P.I., a single-cam sitcom in which New Girl star Jake Johnson (probably not sporting the world’s thickest Chicago accent and cries of hatred for thin-crust pizza) plays a private dick working at a Los Angeles detective agency. (Alongside Jane Levy, Langston Kerman, Mary Shalaby, and Keith David.) Created by Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s Dan Goor and Luke Del Tredici, the series is being executive produced (and had its pilot directed) by Akiva Schaffer, and was apparently considered the series mostly likely to be scooped up from NBC’s recent and uncharacteristic trove of trial shows.
Which is actually skewing weirdly in favor of down-on-their-luck California gumshoes, given that Deadline also reports that the network has picked up David Boreanaz’s Rockford Files reboot to series. We won’t lie, we have questions about this one—James Garner left some pretty big, pretty schlubby suits to fill—but NBC executives were apparently impressed by Boreanaz’s “swagger and dry wit.” Executive produced by Mike Daniels, the series co-stars Michaela McManus, Felix Solis, and Jacki Weaver.
Also in DramaLand, NBC gave a similar series order to Line Of Fire, a show about various members of the FBI, Marshals Service, Secret Service, and Department Of Justice who are all—get this—related to each other. Starring Peter Krause, Hope Davis, Kat Cunning, Tommy O’Brien, Taylor Bloom, and Charlie Barnett, the procedural sounds like it’s attempting to jam together This Is Us and NCIS, as the various flavors of cop all try to protect each other from a deadly conspiracy, “even if it means betraying their sworn code.”
Finally, NBC handed out a series order to Newlyweds, a new series starring TV vets (and actual newlyweds) Téa Leoni and Tim Daly. (If you’ve noticed that all of these series has at least one extremely experienced TV star on hand, that was apparently part of NBC’s thinking in running this expanded—by modern standards—hunt for new shows.) The show’s logline says it’s “A later-in-life love story about a free-spirited woman and a buttoned-up professor who marry impetuously after a whirlwind courtship,” which feels like a lot of extra words when “The Golden Dharma & Greg” was sitting right there.
All told, NBC picked up half of the eight pilots it ordered: Losers in the competition include Katey Sagal and Jane Lynch’s comedy pilot Jill & Ginger, and three dramas: Key Witness, starring Boreanaz’s old Bones buddy Emily Deschanel; What The Dead Know, starring Orange Is The New Black‘s Taylor Schilling; and Puzzled, which starred Johnson’s old loftmate Damon Wayans, Jr.
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