Nellie Andreeva

EXCLUSIVE: Two high-profile Fox projects with pilot production commitments have started the casting process in anticipation of official pilot orders. The decision to begin casting early gives the projects a window before the onslaught of pilot season begins next month.

I Suck At Girls is a single-camera comedy from Bill Lawrence and Warner Bros. TV based on Justin Halpern’s book, the follow-up to his bestseller S**t My Dad Says. The half-hour comedy tells the story of a boy becoming a man, and a man becoming a father, in a time before coming of age was something you could Google. Halpern and Patrick Schumacker wrote the script, with Lawrence supervising. Lawrence, Halpern and Schumacker executive produce with Jeff Ingold.

Legal drama Rake — starring and co-executive produced by Greg Kinnear — is based on the popular Australian series whose co-creator Peter Duncan is writing the U.S. adaptation under Peter Tolan’s supervision. Produced by Sony TV, Rake follows the chaotic world of criminal defense lawyer Cleaver Greene (Kinnear). Brilliant, iconoclastic and innately self-destructive, he has a mind-numbing lack of discretion and a total inability to pause before speaking his mind. From bigamists to cannibals and everything in between, the clients Cleaver loves most are those whose cases appear to be utterly hopeless without him realizing that he, himself, is perhaps the most desperate case of all. Tolan serves as showrunner and is executive producing with Duncan, Richard Roxburgh and Ian Collie. I Suck At Girls and Rake join NBC’s Alfonso Cuarón/J.J. Abrams drama and the CW’s Amazon, which have been doing preliminary castings.

TV Editor Nellie Andreeva - tip her here.