Modified On July 24, 2006
Using a nautical theme, Hollywood Reporter reports that:
(NBC Entertainment President Kevin) Reilly announced he has invited back some of his summer shipmates as well, disclosing orders of new cycles of reality series America’s Got Talent and Last Comic Standing. As was previously announced, Talent will return in January, and “Comic” will come back in June.
Perhaps it will pit Season IV finalist against the finalists of America’s Got Talent, Season I. Would that surprise anyone?
The TV Critics Association get-together is still going on, that means it’s preposterous statement season!
NBC also is making good on its pledge for year-round development, reviving the discarded comedy project Nobody’s Watching after the pilot mysteriously popped up on viral-video Web site YouTube and began generating buzz. Watching is from Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence.
In an unusual departure from standard operating procedure, Watching will resume production immediately in the form of webisodes but also will yield half-hour scripts in anticipation of getting a primetime slot this season.
(Emphasis ours.) We predict that the series will never make it to the small screen, but will instead be a web-only phenomenon (and, it will be discovered, in an autobiography to be published in 2020, that the show was never intended to be made into a primetime series, but was instead always intended as a product to anchor NBC’s experiment with YouTube)… sortofa multiplatform thing, without the other platforms.