‘Up All Night’ Creator Emily Spivey Inks Overall Deal With 20th Century Fox TV
Up All Night creator Emily Spivey has signed a two-year overall deal at 20th Century Fox Television. The pact comes two months after Spivey exited her NBC/Universal TV comedy series. Under the deal, Spivey will work on current series as well as develop new projects for the studio. Her first assignment will be serving as a co-executive producer on 20th TV’s upcoming Fox animated series Murder Police. This brings her back to the beginning of her career when she did gigs on another 20th TV/Fox animated series, King Of The Hill, as well as Fox’s late-night-sketch show MadTV. From there, she moved onto NBC’s Saturday Night Live where she spent a decade, most recently as writing supervisor, and shared in the show’s 2002 writing Emmy. Spivey also did a stint on NBC’s Parks & Recreation. “Emily is one of those unique, funny female voices that we have had our eyes on for some time—we’ve been big fans ever since she worked for us on King Of The Hill at the very start of her career,” 20th TV chairman Gary Newman said. “We believe she has a hit in her, and we want to be the studio which helps her achieve it.”
20th TV has been successful cultivating female writing talent and getting comedy series by female creators on the air, most recently with New Girl (Elizabeth Meriwether), Don’t Trust The B— (Nahnatchka Khan), Ben & Kate (Dana Fox) and the upcoming How To Live With Your Parents (Claudia Lonow).
Meanwhile, Up All Night has fallen apart since Spivey left. NBC had planned to retool the series as a multi-camera sitcom with a five-episode order but that plan suffered a major setback when star Christina Applegate left two weeks ago. NBC subsequently scaled back the plan to one multi-camera episode without Applegate before scrapping the idea altogether. Co-star Will Arnett already signed on for a pilot in second position, CBS’ untitled Greg Garcia, with fellow co-star Maya Rudolph fielding a ton of overall deal and pilot offers. Spivey is represented by UTA and Hansen Jacobson.
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