The Office veteran B.J. Novak has landed a comedy project at HBO Max.
The streamer is developing a multicamera comedy called Young People, written and executive produced by Novak. HBO Max has given a multi-script commitment with penalty to the Warner Bros. TV production, which has opened a writers room to work on a half-dozen scripts.
Young People follows a series order from FX for another show from Novak, a half-hour anthology that will tell character-driven stories using timely issues as a jumping-off point. Novak wrote and directed the pilot for the untitled project and is executive producing.
Young People will center on six people in their 20s, with wildly different backgrounds and perspectives, who share a Brooklyn apartment. It will tackle friendship in the age of argument, connection in the age of disconnection and the joys and anxieties of building a life in a gig-to-gig, date-to-date, month-to-month world where living like "young people" might be a transitional phase of life, or might be permanent.
Young People is the second multicam original set up at HBO Max, joining a reboot of the 1980s comedy Head of the Class from Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence. The streamer, which is set to bow May 27, will have a sizable library of multicam comedies at launch, including Friends, The Big Bang Theory and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, alongside about 10,000 hours of content from across parent company WarnerMedia's catalog and a handful of original series.
Novak wrote and directed episodes of The Office in addition to playing Ryan Howard on the former NBC comedy. He also was a writer and producer on The Mindy Project, created by his Office co-star Mindy Kaling (who, incidentally, also has a comedy at HBO Max). He is repped by CAA, Price Management and Ziffren Brittenham.
Variety first reported the news.
