Breaking In Close to 13 Episode Pickup

[yankeesrj12]

It looks like comedy Breaking In has done the impossible, beating cancellation for a second time. I hear Fox is about to give the single-camera comedy starring Christian Slater and Bret Harrison a 13-epiosde midseason order in a complex deal with series producer Sony Pictures TV, which is still being finalized. It also includes a script commitment with penalty to a comedy pitch by Breaking In co-creator Adam F. Goldberg. The untitled 1980s family comedy, which like Breaking In is co-produced by Sony TV and Happy Madison, hit the market last week and had been pursued by all Big 4 networks.

When all is said and done, this would mark a second improbable return from the dead for Breaking In. The entire cast is expected to come back, including Odette Annable, who recently joined House as a new regular with a deal that includes provisions allowing her to also appear on Breaking In. Created by Goldberg and Horrible Bosses director Seth Gordon, Breaking In was ordered to pilot during the 2009-10 season. Despite raking as Fox’s highest testing pilot back then, the network passed on the workplace comedy set at a digital security firm. Sony kept the project alive by extending the options on the cast. Fox then ordered 2 additional scripts, and in November, the network gave Breaking In a seven-episode midseason order and a post-American Idol time slot. But in May the network canceled the show before it had finished its freshman run. Sony once again fought on. And, in a promising sign that the network had faith in the show and was open to reconsidering its decision, it joined Sony TV is shouldering the cost for extending the cast’s options and then put Breaking In on the list of contenders for its 2-hour midseason comedy block. “We all liked Breaking In but…we had to make a judgment call,” Fox’s entertainment president Kevin Reilly said at TCA last month. “It still has a shot. You know what? Stranger things have happened.” By surviving cancellation twice, Breaking In would join Family Guy as the only shows ever to do it.

As for Goldberg’s new project, it is described as an autobiographical show about growing up in the 1980s with a highly screwed up but loving family. Given the Breaking In renewal, the time frame for the show’s development is still in flux as Goldberg, who is under an overall deal at Sony TV, is expected to concentrate his immediate attention on re-starting Breaking In. With the deal, Fox is doubling down on Goldberg and his voice in an effort to make the network his home. Goldberg started off in TV as writer of Syfy’s 2001 comedy pilot Area 52 and as writer-producer on CBS’ sitcom Still Standing. He segued into movies, writing Fanboys and also working on the DreamWorks animated comedies Monsters vs. Aliens and How to Train Your Dragon. He continues to be busy in features, recently penning the How to Train Your Dragon‘s followup How to Hatch Your Dragon. He also is writing Simon Bloom: The Gravity Keeper.

LINK: http://www.deadline.com/2011/08/fox-...ldberg-comedy/

[R.jsheedy]

This is the best ****ing comedy news i've read all year! So ****ing glad this great ****ing show is coming back from the ****ing dead again!!!! **** YEAH!

[R.jsheedy]

A great article on Sony's agressive efforts to try and bring back Breaking In to TV that i wanted to share.

Not long after I mentioned the endless Breaking In posts done by Deadline.com‘s Nellie Andreeva, she announces that the show will be coming back after being canceled. I don’t think I have ever seen a website campaign as hard to save a show as Deadline campaigned for Breaking In – other than fan websites set up especially for that purpose, I mean. Right after the cancellation, and for a long time after, there would be posts wondering why Fox canceled the show when it tested so well and the ratings after American Idol were better than other shows that ran after American Idol, and so on.

I don’t doubt that the show was newsworthy: it was, after all, given a second chance by Fox and kept in contention, while most shows are just plain canceled. But a lot of the Deadline posts seemed to be specifically from the point of view of the production company, Sony, suggesting (as I said before) that Sony was pushing very hard to save the show and was trying to do so, in part, by feeding a lot of information to to the press.

The Sony executives, who believed in the show and were trying to put as much pressure as possible on Fox, seemed to have a lot of success in getting stories about what a bad idea Fox had in canceling it, how the show got good ratings (they weren’t all that good considering the time slot, though they weren’t terrible), how the testing was great. When we saw Deadline.com posts about Sony’s fight for the show and Fox’s second thoughts, we were seeing showbiz news, but I think we were also seeing the result of a very successful campaign by Sony to keep the show in the news and keep the pressure on Fox. And that’s why Breaking In is back and Traffic Light isn’t. Even though the one time Breaking In aired away from Idol, its ratings were basically as bad as Traffic Light‘s. But Traffic Light didn’t have a high-pressure campaign on its behalf.

Maybe it shows the advantages, to the producers, of not being owned by the network: it’s doubtful that Fox’s own studio would have blitzed its own network as aggressively and endlessly as Sony blitzed Fox and the media. Sony, perhaps because it isn’t affiliated with a single network (even Warners has a stake in the CW), seems to be one of the most aggressive studios when it comes to selling its product to networks. This is the studio that got ‘Til Death an extra season by practically giving it away to Fox. This is the network that still has Rules of Engagement on the air, even if it’s on a Saturday. And on a more artistically acclaimed level, this is the studio that has managed to get three seasons for Community and might very well get more. When a network buys a comedy from Sony, executives should realize that if they try to cancel it, they’re going to wake up near the severed head of the old Columbia Pictures woman.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/08/24/t...-brought-back/

[eclipsesalukis]

Cool, I LOVE this show!!!!!!