Nellie Andreeva

13 years after the premiere of Sex and the City, HBO will launch another comedy about single girlfriends who are a decade younger than Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha. The pay cable network has picked up to series Girls, Lena Dunham’s comedy pilot executive produced by Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner. The 24-year-old prodigy Dunham wrote, directed and starred in the pilot, about the assorted humiliations and rare triumphs of three girlfriends in their early 20s: Hannah (Dunham), an eternal intern at a publishing house in SoHo and a hopeful writer; Marnie (Allison Williams), a sexy, bitchy and ambitious assistant at a slick political PR firm whose goal id to practice environmental law; and Jessa (Jemima Kirke), a space cadet with hippie tendencies who wants to be an artist/educator. The parallels with Sex and the City don’t stop here. Like Carrie, Hannah has a handsome carpenter as a boyfriend too, played by Adam Driver. Dunham, who served as co-executive producer on the pilot, is being upped to executive producer for the series alongside Apatow and Konner. She has been garnering awards attention for her second feature Tiny Furniture. Illene S. Landress is joining the project as a co-executive producer. The series marks the professional debut of Williams, daughter of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who booked the HBO pilot shortly after graduating from Yale last year. Additionally, the project co-stars another famous offspring, David Mamet’s daughter Zosia. HBO recently passed on two drama pilots, All Signs of Death and Miraculous Year. On the comedy side, the Justin Theroux/Steve Coogan pilot Documental has been completed, while the Armando Iannucci’s Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is gearing up for production. The Diane Keaton starrer Tilda is still awaiting its fate after a backup script order and pilot reshoots.

TV Editor Nellie Andreeva - tip her here.

Get the latest Industry news sent straight to your Wall.