NBC Picks Up Pitch For Hour-Long Musical TV Show Produced by Steven Spielberg

It seems I've been getting a lot of my musical information lately, from Slashfilm.com. For Screen/TV adaptations, anyway.

From Slashfilm:

EW has the news, saying that if picked up, the show would “follow a cross section of characters who come together for the “exhilarating ride of putting on a Broadway musical.”

In other words, it’s a new take on the ‘let’s put on a show!’ plot that has driven screen musicals since the very first days of the marriage of sound and the moving image.

Theresa Rebeck wrote the pilot and will exec produce alongside Mr. Spielberg, Darryl Frank, Justin Falvey, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron. Notable to musical fans will be the fact that Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman will create original songs for the series. Michael Mayer may direct.

Expect to hear more moves out of NBC, which has just seen Robert Greenblatt step in as entertainment chairman now that the merger between Comcast and NBC/Universal is going through. (The new suit is the guy that greenlit Weeds and Dexter at Showtime.)


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A grownups' GLEE?

I was thinking the same thing. I wish it were on a network like Showtine or HBO. I was hoping for tone kind of like another Speilberg produced show on Showtime, The United States of Tara, which is one of my all time faves. We'll just have to see how this turns out, though.

The Office? Parks and Recreation?

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Isn't The Office on Fax?

No, Fox only does local reruns for The Office. It's an NBC product. And yes, I did explicitly say UP. The Office started out fantastic, but crashed somewhere in the 3rd or 4th season and has been a wreck ever since. The same thing happened with Heroes, a show I started out thinking was one of the most brilliant things to hit network TV in years. They don't monitor the quality of their products throughout their seasons, and so they have a 'crash and burn' effect that's well known in the TV community.

Of course, there are exceptions like 30 Rock. But I believe 30 Rock succeeds in spite of NBC, not because of it. Half of the humor from that show comes from knocking fun at NBC's fails anyway.But NBC consistently comes in fourth in prime time nowadays, and has very little quality scripted programming.

One favorable thing NBC seems to do right though is niche shows, like 30 Rock or Community or even Chuck. The Cape could even be lucky enough to see the same fate. These are shows that get tiny ratings shares and would be canceled on any other network, but since NBC's ratings are so low, they can keep on the air and keep appealing to their very select fanbase. If we are lucky, this musical show would fall into that category and have a long and prosperous run with a lot of creative freedom.

Sorry for any vague wording and the diatribe. I work in television so I do try to keep up on these things.

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Updated On: 1/22/11 at 06:14 PM

True, and I do think (again, pointing a finger) part of that was due to NBC's mismanagement of the situation. There have been plenty of shows that had shortened seasons during the strike that managed to pick back up and some of which are still quality now- just a few coming to mind are House, Bones, How I Met Your Mother and LOST. You can place some of the blame on the strike, but that's certainly not the entire or even primary reason NBC is a wholly irresponsible network in scripted TV.

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Updated On: 1/22/11 at 06:26 PM

^I agree about Outsourced and Perfect Couples. The pilot for Perfect Couples was pretty terrible last week, and I tried a few episodes of Outsourced last fall and couldn't believe it was even picked up for a full season.

Wasn't this project picked up for a while by Showtime?

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Original songs? I don't see this working out too well...

Heard a rumor: The series traces the story of a show getting to Broadway. The hope is that the show within a show will be produced on Broadway for real some day. Makes sense. If the series is a hit, there is a built in audience and national brand name recognition, rare for a new musical.