New NBC boss Bob Greenblatt isn’t wasting any time getting down to business. He’s only half-officially on the job, but he’s been green-lighting pilots like crazy, including four potential half-hour projects given the thumbs-up this afternoon. The most interesting of today’s bunch is a workplace comedy from oft-brilliant scribe Peter Tolan (Rescue Me, The Larry Sanders Show) that seems to be a cross between Adventureland and the little-seen 1999 CBS summer comedy Thanks. Dubbed Brave New World, Tolan’s show is a workplace comedy about a gang of misfits working at Pilgrim Village, a theme park that re-creates 1637 New England. If it’s done right, we can totally see this fitting in Thursdays at 10:30 p.m. once Outsourced is put out of its (and our) misery.
Meanwhile, Greenblatt is also moving forward with several other projects put in the pipeline by his Peacock predecessors. My Life As an Experiment, one of several A.J. Jacobs–inspired half-hours we told you about in November, is officially a go-to pilot, as is the Whitney Cummings project we broke back in October (can we get a “Toldja!”?). Finally, Greenblatt is also continuing new NBC parent Comcast’s tradition of supporting the career of Chelsea Handler by giving thumbs-up to Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, the previously reported sitcom inspired by Chelsea Handler’s book of the same name. Handler isn’t attached to star in the show, since it’s about the comic’s adventures as a boozy twentysomething.
