Writer and director Nahnatchka Khan, who is best known for sitcoms “Fresh Off the Boat,” “Don’t Trust the B—- In Apartment 23,” and NBC’s “Young Rock” with Dwayne Johnson, is celebrating the launch of her latest laugh, the Stephanie Hsu-led murder comedy “Laid” on Peacock, Thursday with the reveal of her next projects: two more dark comedies, one starring Tony Hale and the other based on the LGBTQ graphic novel “Fuck This Place.”
Titled “Boy Next Door,” the in-the-works TV series is inspired by John Hinckley Jr’s release from prison into his misguided and controlling mother’s house, this dark comedy follows a man who made a huge mistake a long time ago and now just wants to live a normal, unremarkable second half of his life: get a regular job, meet a regular girl, learn how to take a selfie.
Per the project’s logline, “Boy Next Door” asks the question, are we defined by our worst possible moment? And also, how do you send the emojis that move in a text?
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Written by Corey Nickerson, the show — which is not yet attached to a network or streaming platform — is produced by Khan’s film and TV production company Fierce Baby Productions (which has a first-look deal with with Universal Television) and CBS Productions with Hale executive producing.
Based on a graphic novel of the same name by Kyle Starks and Artyom Topilin, “Fuck This Place” follows “a pair of big city lesbians” that inherit a 500 acre dairy farm in the middle of nowhere and assume it’s the “first step towards a beautiful future.” “But when the farm is hiding more than one big supernatural secret, we’ll watch as Gabby and Trudy’s American dream becomes an American nightmare. Will their relationship survive this? Will they?”
Penned by David Smithyman, who will serve as showrunner alongside Khan, the project comes from Fierce Baby alongside Skybound Entertainment and is currently being shopped to platforms.
Nahnatchka Khan on the set of Peacock’s “Laid”/Credit: James Dittiger
James Dittiger/PEACOCK
“I think what would be the common denominator would really just be somebody, whether it’s me or the writer of a show that we’re producing, that somebody’s got a clear vision and a clear point of view and a voice for a world,” Khan said to Variety regarding how the two new projects fit into the overall ethos at Fierce Baby these days. “That’s the connector to me of Fierce Baby projects. And it happens to be that a lot of our projects have female characters at the center, but not all of them. That’s also really interesting to me. And I like the idea of just having somebody with a singular voice and vision and being like, here’s the world that I want to live in. I really can see that with a lot of these projects, and I really appreciate that.”
“Boy Next Door” and “Fuck This Place” are the latest in a string of twisted comedies Khan’s Fierce Baby has been working on in recent years, beginning with Khan directing time-travel slasher-comedy “Totally Killer” with Blumhouse for Amazon; followed by Peacock’s new launch “Laid,” which centers on a woman (played by Hsu) who is trying to figure out why all of her ex-lovers are dying; Netflix rom-com “Dial A for Aunties,” which centers on a young wedding photographer who tries to hide the body of her blind date while working the wedding day of a wealthy client; and “Killer Potential,” a TV series adaptation of an upcoming book that follows two unlikely fugitives — an overeducated and broke SAT tutor who finds her rich employers brutally murdered in their backyard and the mute woman she discovers trapped in the walls of their mansion.
While Khan, Fierce Baby’s head of TV development Jennifer Carreras and chief of film development Chloe Yellin have consistently dabbled across genres, including family sitcoms, feature rom-coms (Khan’s directorial debut Netflix’s “Always Be my Maybe”), standup comedy (Khan directed Ali Wong’s 2022 comedy special, “Ali Wong: Don Wong” for Netflix), Khan acknowledges they’re certainly currently on a horror/murder/death kick with comedic vibes.
“I don’t know when murder entered my lexicon in such a standard way as a throughline, but there’s definitely a dark thread going there,” Khan said. “Back in the day, everything was so delineated, where this is a movie, this is a TV show, this is an hour-long drama, this is a comedy — and then all those lines started to go away with the streamers. And now movies are made for streaming platforms; maybe they go to theaters. And a limited series — is that just a long movie? Is a half-hour show a comedy, or is it just a half hour of storytelling? You definitely still have your traditional, this is a procedural, this is a half-hour multi-camera, but most of the lines have been blurred. And I think, for me, too, the stuff that I like to do, and I’m gravitating towards, all the lines are blurred. Ao it will always have a comedic streak, like it’ll always be funny. But it could be all these other things also. I don’t you know when that happened, but I think definitely everything’s kind of melding together.”
As for where Fierce Baby goes from here — beyond exploring topics outside of death — Carreras says the team hopes to expand its overall volume of projects and do much more in the drama category.
“Natch and Fierce Baby have such deep roots in comedy so we’re really excited about developing more in the one hour space to continue to expand and challenge our brand,” Fierce Baby head of TV development Jennifer Carreras said. “And as Natch continues with her projects as writer/director, it’s a very important objective to support other creators and take advantage of Natch’s producorial expertise. We’re incredibly proud to have produced shows during a pandemic and immediately coming out of a strike, but ready to grow in terms of volume.”