NBC has made their long-awaited decisions on their large pilot slate, ordering four to series and passing on four others.
Drama pilot The Rockford Files, starring David Boreanaz, Jacki Weaver, Michaela McManus, and Felix Solid, was long seen as a favorite for a pickup. The series is a contemporary remake of the James Garner classic, which ran for six seasons on NBC in the 1970s. It will focus on a PI who has recently been paroled, who uses his wit to solve cases around LA, landing him in trouble with both the LAPD and organized crime.
NBC's other new drama will also be headlined by a popular TV veteran in Peter Krause. Krause, who once starred on the network's long-running family drama Parenthood, will toppling Line of Fire alongside Hope Davis. It will center on a family of law enforcement agents who take on cases for the FBI, US Marshals, Secret Service, and the DOJ. When a simple case turns into a deadly conspiracy, they use their knowledge from their lives of service to protect one another and bring the killer to justice, breaking their own sworn code.
On the comedy side, Sunset PI was always seen as a favorite for a pickup, and it has indeed been ordered. The single-cam sitcom from the creative mind behind Brooklyn Nine-Nine stars Jake Johnson, Jane Levy, Langston Kerman, Mary Shalaby and Keith David, and will center on PIs in Los Angeles - a recurring theme for NBC pickups this year.
Newlyweds will be their multicam comedy pickup, and will star real-life newlyweds - and former Madam Secretary co-stars - Tea Leoni and Tim Daly. It centers on a free-spirted woman and a strait-laced professor who marry late in life after a whirlwind courtship. Jamie Lee Curtis, an executive producer on the project, will recur.
The pickup of these four pilots marks the end of the line for four other projects - Emily Deschanel pilot Key Witness, Taylor Schilling's Dick Wolf-EP'd What the Dead Know, Jane Lynch and Katey Sagal's Jill & Ginger, and Damon Wayans Jr's Puzzled - which have now been passed on. Key Witness is being shopped to other networks, while What the Dead Know is being retooled.
