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9 months ago
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EXCLUSIVE: The Kumars are plotting a return — this time on American television. Fox has ordered a presentation for multi-camera comedy Meet The Kumars, a followup to the award-winning 2001 BBC series The Kumars At No. 42. Most of the original cast is back for the U.S.-flavored revival of the family sitcom/talk show.
Fox also has come in as a partner on The Donut (working title), a single-camera family business comedy in development at Canada’s CBC from Catherine Reitman and Philip Sternberg, stars of CBC/Netflix’s popular comedy Workin’ Moms, which Reitman created.
The two commissions are part of Fox’s international content expansion, which involves developing and producing scripted series with local creators and studios in English-language territories, currently Canada and the UK and ultimately Australia as well.
Fox’s live-action comedy night ambitions
Meet the Kumars and The Donut also are part of a new wave of comedy development at Fox.
“We’re in the process of rebuilding our comedy brand around Animal Control,” said Michael Thorn, Fox Entertainment’s President, Scripted Programming.
The series starring Joel McHale is the only live-action current comedy on Fox as well as the network’s only fully owned live-action show. In a big vote of confidence following a strong Season 1 linear and streaming performance, Fox recently gave Animal Control an early Season 3 renewal ahead of the comedy’s Season 2 debut on March 6.
“Our goal is to reclaim the comedy brand that we had with bold characters, relevant concepts, big funny, and use Animal Control as our foundation of a comedy block,” Thorn said. “We have a lot of ambition to grow that night out beyond one show to hopefully down the line have a whole night of live-action comedy.” (The last time Fox had a two-hour live-action comedy block was during the 2015–16 season; it was anchored by New Girl and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.)
The plan is to do that piece by piece, Thorn said, starting with hopefully creating “an undeniable one-hour live-action comedy block” next season by leaning into the network’s pipeline featuring internally owned comedies, half-hours with studio partners as well as international development.
“To do that, we need incredible voices who are hilarious and have relevant things to talk about,” he said.
The search for new voices has spurred Fox’s interest in international content co-productions which also offer underlying financial benefits that are appealing to a non-vertically integrated linear network like Fox. (Fox already has its owned comedy series, Animal Control, film in Vancouver.)
Fox handed the first series greenlight under the international content strategy in December to Canadian psychological crime drama Murder in a Small Town, starring Rossif Sutherland and Kristin Kreuk, which the network is co-producing and has the U.S. rights to for a 2024-25 launch.
Thorn acknowledged that comedy sensibilities are harder to translate to another country, noting that “given that sometimes comedy can be local, most of our international focus will be on drama.”
The Schitt’s Creek Connection
A rare international comedy success in the U.S. came out of Canada’s CBC, the Emmy-winning phenom Schitt’s Creek, which also was a co-production with a U.S. linear network, Pop.
Meet the Kumars and The Donut share some DNA with Schitt’s Creek, which follows the dysfunctional Rose family.
“Both The Kumars and Donut are very unique family comedies with strong points of view, but I think very specific families that have very universal theme and access points,” Thorn said. “Because of that universality, I hope that they can resonate the same way that Schitt’s Creek did with that unique family.”
Meet the Kumars
A presentation for Meet the Kumars — a blend of scripted comedy, improv and interview show — will be filmed in the UK next month with original cast members Sanjeev Bhaskar, his wife Meera Syal and Vincent Ebrahim reprising their roles as aspiring broadcaster Sanjeev, his grandmother and father, respectively. They are joined by a new cast addition, Shaheen Khan, who plays Rani, Sandjeev’s new stepmom.
The Kumars are a typical middle-class British Indian family who have bulldozed their backyard to build a state-of-the-art TV studio where they host their very own talk show. In the new iteration, the Kumars have America in sight for their backyard talk show.
UK’s Hat Trick Prods., which was behind the original series, is the studio, with the company’s managing director Jimmy Mulville executive producing alongside Sarah Fraser, Bhaskar and Syal.
“We’re thrilled to be working with Fox on this presentation and look forward to introducing our much loved Kumars family to an American audience,” Mulville said.
The original 2001 series, which, by fortuitous circumstance, is available on Fox’s streaming platform Tubi, ran for seven seasons, winning a Peabody and two International Emmy Awards. It was followed by a six-episode 2014 Sky revival, The Kumars.
“Even though that series was made several years ago, the approach to a multi-cam and a talk show, this hybrid format, it’s wildly original,” Thorn said, adding that the acclaimed comedy still “feels fresh and funny and topical.”
Keeping the original auspices
Meet the Kumars came out of a conversation Thorn had with Melville about possible collaborations. There had been an attempt to adapt The Kumars At No. 42 in the U.S. In a bidding war with Fox, NBC landed the project, The Ortegas, about a Mexican-American family, in 2002. A pilot, starring Al Madrigal and Cheech Marin, went into turnaround after NBC passed. It was picked up by Fox with a series order but was eventually scrapped.
Coincidentally, Fox’s two most recent live-action comedy series besides Animal Control, Call Me Kat and Welcome To Flatch, also were U.S. adaptations of British formats by American writers. For Meet the Kumars, the network is taking a different route, retaining the original creative team, including a group of British writing team for the presentation that includes Bhaskar and fellow The Kumars at No. 42 alum Richard Pinto.
“I think the storytelling with this hybrid format is so unique, and it’s something that the original team, with Sanjeev, Meera and Hat Trick, they had a vision for how to do this show,” Thorn said. “What usually works is supporting the vision and allowing that vision to come through as specifically as strongly as possible as opposed to having someone else adapt their show because the only version that’s really resonated for people was the original.
“So our instinct was, rather than try to get someone to replicate their magic, go to the source and let this brilliant team do it themselves,” Thord continued. “They have a very simple and specific way to capture the original magic but also feel like it will play for a U.S. domestic audience in a way that feels surprising and, hopefully, on-point for a Fox viewer.”
Seeking multi-camera comedies
With their lower cost compared to single-camera comedies and good repeatability, multi-cam sitcoms are staging a comeback. All of NBC’s current comedy series are multi-cam, and ABC and CBS both have multi-camera comedies on their air. Meet the Kumars could bring the format back to Fox, something Thorn would welcome.
“We really believe in the multi-camera format,” he said. “I think the creator and the vision for the comedy is probably more important to us than a specific format — whether it’s single camera, multi-camera or a docu comedy — but we’re open to any unique way to tell a great comedic character piece.”
Thorn lamented the scarcity of multi-cam ideas that fit the Fox brand.
“We wish we had more multi-cam pitches, especially the ones that felt bold and broad and surprising,” he said. “They’re just few and far between in the marketplace right now. That’s just the reality of it. But we still believe in the format if it’s the right show for us.”
More Presentations?
Fox moved away from the pilot development model in 2020, leaving the door open to rare presentations for comedy projects.
Meet the Kumars is getting one because “it has a talk show element in it, and the improv element that occurs within the unique family comedy is something that you really need to see and not read,” Thorn said. “I would say in the future, if there’s a unique concept or approach to storytelling that is best served in a presentation, we’re very open to it, but it will be the exception not the rule.”
The Donut
Fox executives had been tracking Catherine Reitman and her husband Philip Sternberg to do something together when the opportunity came about for the network to join The Donut, which had been in development at CBC.
In The Donut, three siblings with nothing in common besides their larger-than-life father and a desperation to forge their own destinies find themselves back together, running his beloved empire in the “high stakes” world of low-rent donut shops.
Reitman and Sternberg are writing the script and will executive produce with Arnie Karp for Wolf + Rabbit.
Could Reitman and Sternberg, who starred together on Workin’ Moms, also act on The Donut?
“I hope so,” Thorn said, adding, “Right now we’re really focused on the writing. We haven’t gotten that far in the process but we love the team.”
Fox Entertainment is licensing The Donut in the U.S. Worldwide content sales division. Fox Entertainment Global, will handle distribution in all territories other than Canada.
For Meet the Kumars, Fox Entertainment has licensed all distribution rights in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, with FEG overseeing sales. Hat Trick International retains distribution rights in all other territories.
