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UPFRONTS 2013: The Overachievers 
EXCLUSIVE: I’ve learned that HBO has just bought a comedy pitch based on the modern day Lucy-&-Ricky 10-year marriage of Brandt and Nikki Joel. Brandt, 45, is head of WME’s talent department, and Nikki, 38, is a former ICM agent. Gilmore Girls and Desperate Housewives writer Jordon Nardino — natch, a WME client — has already been put on the project. The genesis for the show is Nikki Joel’s tell-all blog about her marriage — LifestyleLemonaid.com — where she regularly shares with the Internet her husband’s most intimate details. The time he wanted to have a vasectomy… the time she caught him masturbating in the middle of the night during an earthquake… the time he erased all her Tivo-ed shows because he was pissed she’d gone out 3 nights in a row without him… Both Joels pitched the show in person to HBO along with producer Steve Levinson — “the last guy Nikki blew before she met me”, as Brandt explained to the room. The pay channel’s Sue Naegle and Michael Lombardo bought the pitch right then and there. Plans are to change Brandt’s profession — “there’s only one great agent on TV and that’s Ari Gold,” Brandt told me — but otherwise the couple will be portrayed true to life by Nardino, producers Mark Wahlberg and Levinson, and HBO exec Amy Gravitt. “I just want the show to get on the air,” Brandt said.
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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Wow. This sounds just… awful.
My thoughts exactly. It’s telling that Hollywood thinks masturbation is something the rest of the world wants to watch. Someone should tell them that just because it puts a smile on THEIR face doesn’t mean it will do the same for us.
You don’t remember the “I Love Lucy” episode when Ricky is masturbating loudly and Lucy wakes up? “Ricky, what was that – is there someone in the apartment … Ricky, waaaaaa Ricky!” Or the episode she tells him she gave Fred a b.j. before they were married? Comedy classics.
I’m British. I find both of those as funny as a root canal. I can say, as an international demographic (yes, I have no HBO and have a limited idea of what it is, but even terrible (more terrible than usual) US ‘comedy’ will hit the international market eventually. Personally, I’d rather go face to face with my dentist with a chainsaw aimed straight for my molars than watch either ‘classic’ you quoted, and get up close and personal with a shot gun before this tripe in question. Call me prudish and stuck up, but what precious few of my countrymen, who scorn humour on masturbation and laugh at good old humour…well, they half make me say ‘Rule, Britannia!’. This nearly makes me cry. How awful!
The team at HBO, led by agents and businessmen, are starting to show their true colors. I’m embarrassed for them all.
Truly dimwits here! Who the f..k cares about thelives of these people…the fact that HBO bought this crap…unbelievable..The studios and networks keep hiring their alter ego’s to run this business and it’s going to worse before it gets a little bit better. More crap to add to TV guide! Way to go —-HBO
It would sound awful, but Nikki Joel’s blowjobs are industry renound!
About as funny as painting a wall with a toothbrush- SLAINTE
I think Brandt must be looking for a career change as well after this…
Ugh, this woman’s blog is poorly written, spammy drivel filled with product placement. When there are so many good ideas out there, why give the green light to such utter crapola?
Truly dreadful writing…can’t look at her site anymore…my eyes are strobing.
Everything is “crapola” until a good writer is brought in. I worked with Nardino a few year back. If anyone can make this concept sizzle even more, he can. A really funny, edgy kid. Good for him.
True, Nardino is good, but is he that good? Maybe HBO should have actually read the blog instead of buying it in the room. Most of the posts are deathly boring.
An Ex-UTA Love Story! Brandt has always been brutally off the cuff and hilarious. Should be worth watching.
Yawn. Agents who want to cross the desk and have their lives become the focus of a TV show. Ugh. Drama queens….
They sound like real class acts.
Perfect fit for HBO.
The glory days of HBO are truly behind them with this shit!
Are you kidding? They have some great drams in Treme, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, A Game of Thrones and Luck So, their days in dramas department aren’t over. Steve Buscemi is a great choice for a mob boss
so much hype around boardwalk empire.. who knows, maybe it’ll be great. but the era of shows as masterful as ‘the wire’ ‘the sopranos’ and ‘six feet under’ are gone.
Jakes right. Boardwalk Empire is going to be great. According to several newspaper articles, Boardwalk Empire was hot at the tv screenings for pilots for foreign networks.
A-greed!
Makes sense. Everyone knows obnoxious miserable people make good TV.
Let me get this straight… The man leaves his wife in the bed to go masturbate? What’s wrong with this picture? She shouldn’t want to share that with anyone. You know the business is on its last leg when the people responsible for repping content are excited to be reality “celebrities.” The bar for stardom has reached an new low.
It won’t be long before Ari Emmanuel hosts his own kosher cooking show.
She mistook his vigorous bed-shaking masturbating for a middle-of-the-night earthquake. It so dishonors the memory of “I Love Lucy” to make any comparisons.
Hung. Entourage. Curb. This tripe. HBO — where the comedy is comedy-free.
Pls don’t lump Curb in with the other three. Tks.
Ditto, liam gallagher.
You wish! Liam Gallagher? Ha. He’s cooler than you’ll ever think about being.
Another good reason to cancel my HBO subscription.
So…I just clicked to the blog. And it’s smug, poorly written, wink-wink, nudge-nudge garbage…
For this to sell and then possibly get on the air, I suspect the blow jobs will continue for the foreseeable future.
H.B.O., where a blow gets your show a go. H.B.Blow?
This junk is exactly why Hollywood fails nine times out of ten. Lets recall, during the Golden Age Hollywood succeeded nine point five times out of ten.
Nobody knows anything because they are so socially removed from the middle class audience that they hate and fear them.
Lucy and Ricky (pretended) to be middle class and “normal” with a “normal” middle class couple (Fred and Ethel) in 1950′s NYC. It was a hit because it fed the fantasy that Hollywood was Middle Class (it wasn’t, in those days, but it was not so socially distant or hostile to middle class people).
This kind of junk is intensely interesting to Hollywood insiders, and those in the female audience with Princess fantasies they never abandoned past age 13. Its pretty repellent to everyone else, another Heidi Montag — Spencer Pratt type show (or Ricky Hollywood and Bristol Palin). A trainwreck in the making.
Not the least of which is how pathetic and unmanly a man has to be to tolerate his various eccentricities published for the attention it gets his wife. That sense of lack of dignity is deeply unattractive and smacks of desperation. As in “This is the only woman I can get so I better tolerate it.”
Bravo whiskey – I could not respond more aptly or succinctly than you have. I especially agree with your last paragraph… has this man no pride to condone his wife sharing such personal details? I think their boundaries have blurred This deal may provide the ante for the impending divorce.
Hi Mel.
Who besides an agent would discuss his wife giving blow jobs to other men? Do they have a title yet? Let’s see, HUNG is taken….how about CIRCLE JERK?
it’s so heart warming and unusual in LA for a d-bag and bimbo wife to make good
Amazing
Been done.
hideous. and how is it lucy & ricky?
Sounds like a nice couple, I’m surprised no BJ’s were offered up during the pitch, I’m sure that fact just didn’t make it to press
Wow. She really wore that to the beach? My retinas are now burning. Were the batteries included?
Anyhow, what’s the one type of show no one in America out side of L.A. wants to watch…….. one about movies, and especially movie AGENTS! (Yes, Entourage was an anomaly).
Batteries? For the outfit or for her hair?
That idea is as good as the one they had for LeBron James. At least that one got good ratings. This is appalling.
Well said. Best destruction of a brand in 60 minutes of less. So worth the 2.5 mil they donated to the Boys & Girls club.
Yeah, because Mel’s a stand up moral guy. This couple may be a step up fro trailer trash, but at least they aren’t misogynistic bigots. Who teaches your Sunday School class? Westboro Baptist?
Solipsism at it worst. They think that their life together is sooo interesting that it should be a TV show?!?! Guess what? Its not.
Did Ellen’s love life get big ratings? No, It killed her show. Did people want to see Billy Crystal’s movies about “him” (Mr. Saturday Night of Forget Paris)? Nope.
Get over yourselves.
Show could be good, just don’t let Ally Musika near it or she’ll ruin it like she did the Ari Gold character.
Dude, it totally has to be called “Vasectomy & Masturbation”. That is a GREAT title.