Comedy Central Picks Up Two New Series

NEW YORK, March 27: Comedy
Central gave the green light to two new series, including a “fake” magazine
show hosted by David Alan Grier.

Slated for a premiere
during the first quarter of 2009, the tentatively titled David Alan Grier’s
Chocolate News takes an
unabashedly biased approach as it investigates urban pop-culture topics. The
spoof news reports include coverage of an operation to save black and white
conjoined twins, steroid use in Little Leaguers and a rapper’s public-service
announcement gone awry. The series will be executive produced by Grier, Robert
Morton, Fax Bahr and Adam Small and Generate's Peter Aronson and Jordan Levin.
Gary Mann is the executive in charge of production for Comedy Central.

The channel has also
ordered a satire of the reality genre from 3Ball Productions with the working
title Reality Bites. The show
features comedians in an elimination-style reality competition where every
episode is a self-contained spoof of one of the major reality formats, such as
"Are You Smarter Than A Monkey?," "So You Think You Can
Dive!," "Almost American Gladiators" and "The Amazing
Disgrace." The winner will end up being the "last comic
standing" and will win a cash prize. Reality Bites is executive produced by 3Ball Production’s J.D.
Roth, Todd Nelson and Adam Greener. Dan Powell is the executive in charge of
production for Comedy Central.

"We are thrilled to
be moving ahead with these two totally unique series that bring fresh new
concepts and distinctive points of view to Comedy Central, which will appeal
not only to the channel's core audience but to fans of David's and fans of the
reality craze," said Lauren Corrao, the channel’s president of original
programming and development. "David brings a new, urban outlook to the
magazine-show parody that will be a perfect complement to our current
programming and 3Ball Productions is the ideal partner to turn the reality
genre upside down from the inside out."

—By Ned Berke