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NBC has announced a pilot order that, for us anyway, strikes us as the year's strangest. Not because it's about aliens with weird accents living nextdoor to a regular family or anything. (ABC already has that show.) It's because of the guy in charge. You see, Alfonso Cuarón is doing a TV show with NBC. Yes, like one of the greatest living directors Alfonso Cuarón, the man behind Y Tu Mama and Children of Men. He's doing a television pilot. For NBC. With J.J. Abrams. The show is called Believe and was co-written by Cuarón. It's about "the unlikely relationship between a girl in possession of a great gift/powers — which will come into their own in seven years — and the man who is sprung from prison to protect her from those trying to hunt her down." Huh. OK. That sounds... like a lot of other crappy shows from years past, from Heroes to Touch, which isn't good. But, it's him! It's Cuarón! So maybe it will be good anyway? He's directing it, too, so there's no way it can be terrible, right? This is all very strange, that he would debase himself so. But, hey, I guess people gotta eat, right? Even Alfonso Cuarón's gotta eat. [Deadline]
Some less strange pilot news: NBC has ordered a sitcom written by and starring John Mulaney, the cutie-patootie standup comedian and Saturday Night Live writer who has a fun, self-deprecating, vaguely old-timey sense of humor. The show will be "loosely based on the life" of Mulaney, which means it's sorta low-concept, and it will be multi-camera, neither of which makes the show sound that promising. But, again, Mulaney is good and Lorne Michaels is the executive producer, so it's certainly a project worth following. Who knows, maybe he'll get Iñárritu to direct the pilot. [The Hollywood Reporter]