NBC’s new untitled comedy, based on a book by Orli Auslander, will have Sarayu Blue in the lead role, while another untitled comedy at Fox has cast Janina Gavankar as a series regular.
The NBC pilot, based on the Orli Auslander book “I Feel Bad: All Day. Every Day. About Everything,” will see Blue as Emet, a video game storyboard artist and mother who suffers the side effects of trying to have it all.
As Emet tries to balance her work with personal fulfillment, she turns to her young male coworkers at her startup for advice.
The series comes from Aseem Batra, Amy Poehler and Julie Anne Robinson.
Blue, who has been acting since the early 2000s, is known for her recurring role on Fox’s “Sons of Tucson” and as Dr. Sydney Napur in the short-lived TNT medical drama “Monday Mornings.”
On Fox, another untitled comedy pilot, helmed by “New Girl” creator Liz Meriwether, has Don Johnson and Erin Foster as father and daughter in the leading roles.
Gavankar will play Sasha, Foster’s best friend with whom Johnson falls in love.
The actress was last seen as Homeland Security Agent Diana Thomas in the fourth season of Fox’s supernatural series “Sleepy Hollow.”
Calls for increased diversity on television have not gone unnoticed, if this pilot season is any indication. The two comedy pilots join a handful of others that have cast Asian American actors as leads or as series regulars, among them ABC’s “Greatest American Hero” and “False Profits,” NBC’s “The Enemy Within” and CBS’ “Pandas in New York,” which follows an Indian American family of doctors.
