Netflix has landed another pair of award-winning talents for its latest venture into sitcoms.
The latest multi-camera comedy from Netflix has been revealed, and Chuck Lorre – the man behind shows such as The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men – will be teaming up with Kathy Bates (American Horror Story) for a marijuana-focused comedy entitled Disjointed. The official logline sounds like fairly standard sitcom fare, however:
Disjointed is a workplace comedy starring Kathy Bates as a lifelong advocate for legalization who’s finally living her dream as the owner of an L.A.–area cannabis dispensary. Joining her are three budtenders, her twenty-something son and a deeply troubled security guard. All of them are more or less constantly high.
No release date for Disjointed has been announced yet, but it has received a 20 episode order and will be moving directly to series. This isn’t too surprising as Netflix doesn’t really go through a pilot process, and with the quality of past work from people involved, you can be pretty much guaranteed people will check it out from pure curiosity.
Netflix has done one other multi-camera sitcom up to this point in the form of The Ranch from Ashton Kutcher. The series did get renewed for a second season, but not without a lot of complaints about its overwhelming laugh track. Hopefully Netflix has learned a lesson there and Disjointed won’t suffer from a similar issue.
The new series was shopped around to networks as well at the same time, but it was Netflix that picked it up. This once again shows that streaming is becoming a major player that it is considered at the same time as networks. With networks ratings already dropping over the past few seasons, when will they begin to take outlets such as Netflix as a serious threat to their welfare?