NBC Nearly Had An “Animation Domination”-Like Lineup With Greg Daniels At The Forefront

On the back of Mike Judge and Greg Daniels announcing the launch of a new animation studio called Bandera Entertainment where the studio hopes to focus on the development and production of a host of adult animation, spearheaded by a return of King of the Hill. With Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head also getting a revival, one of adult animation’s biggest names is muscling his way back into an industry he helped popularize.

You may remember, that Greg Daniels had attempted to kick off a prime-animation lineup for NBC with new series from the likes of Mindy Kaling and Alan Yang more than ten years ago, but we didn’t hear much about it other than the series going forward, certainly no real behind-the-scenes insight. Here are a couple of notes that I found fascinating in Greg Daniels’ recent profile on THR when the subject was brought up. For starters, the network was banking on John Goodman-starrer Father of the Pride (which debuted the same season as The Office) to be a flagship series:

The thing that NBC was banking everything on was this cartoon called Father of the Pride. It was a sitcom about the lions and tigers that belonged to Siegfried and Roy. I remember hearing that Jeffrey Katzenberg had flown all the NBC executives to Las Vegas to meet with Siegfried and Roy and see the tigers. That was the pitch. If he’d had to do it on Zoom, they might have seen that there were some holes in the idea.

Obviously, with Father of the Pride, the Jeffrey Katzenberg (who also launched the recently faltered Quibi), the show didn’t last beyond the initial 15 episodes. This probably put a bad taste in the network’s mouth which then led to this:

During my time at NBC, the only people putting on cartoons were at Fox. I was like, “I wrote Fox shows. Now I’m writing NBC shows. It’s the same kind of writing and the same kind of audience.” I had this whole thing in my deal to start an animated night on NBC. I had one show [in development] with Alan Yang and another with Mindy [Kaling]. NBC didn’t ever go for it. They would buy, like, two animated shows off of six animated pitches or something like that.

Our Take

For whatever reason, NBC has never been able to get adult animation correct on it’s own family of networks. Last year, Syfy attempted to launch the TZGZ block that, despite solid content, was seldom marketed and constantly mishandled from a scheduling perspective. With Peacock’s impending launch, there is some signs of life that the company wants to do right by the adult animation industry, however, we’ll have to see if anything further comes from these efforts of any substance.