Nellie Andreeva

EXCLUSIVE: Less than a week after new CW president Mark Pedowitz indicated that the network will be open to comedies this development season, the CW has made its first half-hour buy, Todd Graff’s summer camp comedy Acting Out, executive produced by Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas. This is a multicamera half-hour version of the project that CW originally developed as a an hourlong musical dramedy last season when it was described as Glee meets Bad Santa. Acting Out is now being retooled as a workplace comedy with performance pieces. It will explore relationships of counselors and staff of a down-on-its-luck summer camp whose new owner, a young curmudgeon in the vein of Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa, runs afoul of the camp’s general manager, a sexy but wound-too-tight former actress. Bandslam writer-director Graff will adapt his original script and executive produce with Goldsmith-Thomas for CBS TV Studios. Goldsmith-Thomas Prods executive Marisa Yeres is also expected to get a producing credit. This is a familiar setting for Graff, who also wrote and directed the 2003 film Camp, about a burnt-out Broadway songwriter who goes to work at a musical camp for young performers. At TCA last week, Pedowitz said the network will develop comedy “very slowly, very smartly — baby steps, selectively.”

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