LOS ANGELES – Jamie Lee Curtis says “love” is at the heart of her new sitcom Newlyweds, which premiered on Friday, 23 October.
Curtis co-created the series, executive produces it and appears in it as a recurring guest star. She told PEOPLE that love is “ultimately at the core” of it.
“This is free TV! You get to turn us on on Friday night at 8:30 on NBC,” she said. “What we get to bring you is love, aspirational love.”
The show is billed as a “later-in-life love story”. Real-life married couple Téa Leoni and Tim Daly play Jeanie, a free-spirited woman, and James, a buttoned-up professor, who marry impulsively in Las Vegas after a whirlwind courtship of about six weeks.
Curtis plays James’s glamorous, meddling ex-wife, Claudia. Emma Meisel and Ignacio Diaz-Silverio play Jeanie’s adult children, Poppy and Lolo, and Bill O’Neill plays James’s Norwegian-born research assistant.
Idea came from overheard moment
Curtis said the idea came from an overheard moment. A driver in New York mentioned that he had a new wife, and he was a man in his sixties. “In that moment, I knew [there] was a sitcom about people in their 60s and 70s who hooked up and got married on a whim,” she said. She also noted that the centre of most sitcoms is family, so here “you have family and love as a combo”.
The project has personal meaning. Curtis, 67, has called the 1989 to 1992 series Anything But Love, which she made with the late Richard Lewis, her favourite job. She has said she has asked her agents for a sitcom every year. “I couldn’t get a job on a sitcom, and now I can because I created one,” she joked.
NBC ordered the pilot in January. It was once set up at Netflix, with Curtis in a lead role. Newlyweds is a multi-camera sitcom from Universal Television, Lionsgate Television and The Tannenbaum Company, directed by Pamela Fryman.
Variety’s review called it “fun and refreshing”. The second episode airs on 30 October.
