American cable network HBO have ordered a pilot for new fashion-orientated comedy, Spring/Fall. The show, set in New York’s fashion industry, will star Tea Leoni and follow “a dysfunctional partnership between two women with different approaches to career, family and friendship.” It’s a vague, slightly mumsy description but with Six Feet Under writer Kate Robin on board we have high(ish) hopes. Leoni and Robin will co-produce the show, along with documentary filmmaker R.J. Cutler, best known by fashion types as the guy who got all up in Anna Wintour’s business for The September Issue.
Leoni’s last credited TV appearance was on the X-Files more than a decade ago (retrospectively awesome Leoni vehicle The Naked Truth ended in ’98), however you might remember her from a variety of mediocre films such as Spanglish or Fun With Dick and Jane. Coupled with a new Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ half hour comedy Veep, Spring/Fall is part of HBO’s post-Sex And The City shift to recruit more female comedy viewers, with most of their current half-hour comedies targeting men. Entourage, for example. Are you a girl that has gotten through more than ten minutes of that misogyny-fest? Congratulations. You, my friend, are an anomaly.
Sure, fashion workplace comedies can be great (see: Just Shoot Me) or middling to terrible (see: Ugly Betty) but we’re quietly excited about this one. Also, if Spring/Fall is pursued by HBO it is possible it will air at the same time as Showtime’s Californication, whose charismatic prick of a protagonist, Hank Moody, just so happens to be played by Leoni’s husband, David Duchovny. Now that would be something.
Via Deadline
Words By Ingrid Kesa
