Despite all the time surely spent spying on malicious heiresses and saving cities from comical hauntings, Melissa McCarthy has another project that’s about to come to fruition. She and her husband, Ben Falcone, are executive producing a new comedy for TV Land currently titled Friends With Melissa.
The story is as its title would suggest: it follows the (fictionalized) lives of Melissa McCarthy and her husband’s friends from the L.A. comedy troupe The Groundlings. The friends in question are Hugh Davidson, Larry Dorf and Rachel Ramras, who wrote the show. The comedy will explore the lives of these three writers as they navigate their friendships with other members of their troupe who’ve gone on to achieve major Hollywood success, while they’ve, according to The Hollywood Reporter, “tiled away writing for children’s television.”
Apart from executive producing the show, McCarthy will appear in the pilot. Keith Cox, The Executive V.P. of Development, said of the pilot and of TV Land’s shifting identity:
We are continuing to build our stable of innovative, engaging and challenging comedies, which is exactly what Melissa, Ben and these writers have brought us… With this script being from a group of alums from The Groundlings, we’re excited to know they’ll have an endless amount of creativity and interesting experiences to pull from.