Jamie Lee Curtis had just wrapped a movie when, during the 1988 pilot season, ABC offered her a half-hour multi-camera pilot. She did it and loved it, so she was bummed when the network didn’t pick it up to series that May. She went to do another movie, and, while she was filming, A Fish Called Wanda came out in July 1988, making Curtis an overnight global star.
Suddenly, ABC called and told her they wanted to pick up that pilot, which became Anything But Love, a sitcom that ran for four seasons.
“It was my favorite job I’ve ever had,” Curtis recalled during a panel Monday for the new NBC multi-camera comedy Newlyweds, which she executive produces and recurs on. “And I’m 68 years old, and every single year, all I’ve ever said to my agents is ‘I want to do a sitcom. All I want to do is a sitcom.’ It’s my favorite job, I love the whole part of it, every aspect of it, the dance with the cameras, the idea that you actually get to rehearse something and work it and learn a joke and play it. I just never got to do it, and so I just decided to basically kind of create my own job. I met Gail, and that’s why we are all here.”
Gail Lerner is Newlyweds‘ writer and executive producer.
Curtis had done single-camera comedy series over the years, including New Girl and The Bear, but is not a fan of the form.
“I’m telling you, I have begged my agents ‑‑ and by the way, I did a single‑camera, which I hate. I mean, great show, New Girl, very funny,” she said. “It’s a good show, but doing it is just like doing a movie. You’ve got a camera crew, and nobody laughs. They are silent, and it’s awful, for me, awful. Single‑camera comedy is not fun.”
Newlyweds is a later‑in‑life love story about a free‑spirited woman (Téa Leoni) and a buttoned‑up professor (Tim Daly) who marry impetuously after a whirlwind courtship. Curtis plays the professor’s ex-wife, “a bitch,” in her own words.
Curtis, an Oscar winner who is married to filmmaker Christopher Guest, spoke about the genesis of the idea for Newlyweds.
“The truth of the matter is I met my husband and married him after seeing his picture in a magazine, and we had never spent more than 72 hours together before we got married, I mean at one time,” she said. “I think you can know what we did for the other 70 hours (that line was met with laughter from the room). There wasn’t a lot of talking. We were strangers when we married, and then you wake up one day and go, like, ‘Wow. He really doesn’t talk.’”
Continued Curtis, “We have been married for 42 years, thank you very much. But the point is that there’s always been that aspect of my relationship with my husband, we are polar opposites, and that was when we started talking about a later‑in‑life thing that happens to people in their 60s, who hook up and kind of go, ‘You know what, let’s do this.’ There’s something really delicious about watching people figure out life when they are filled in a life with other people, and that’s ultimately what we kind of wanted the show to be.”
Lerner spoke about how she and NBC got involved.
“Jamie brought me this idea during the pandemic, so we’ve been really generating it for a very long time. And for a million various reasons, it was hibernating for a while, and a lot of people say my project died, but I just knew my project was hibernating,” she said. “And then NBC called in November of 2025 and said, ‘Hey, let’s do that show,’ and we were off to the races.”
Lerner gave NBC props for “reinvesting in multi-cam and bringing back Must See TV.”
Curtis also stressed the fact that Newlyweds is on a broadcast network that is accessible to anyone.
“It’s also must-see free TV,” she said. “You have to remember, a lot of people don’t have any money anymore, people are really struggling, and cable and all of the things you have to spend money on. This is network television, and I actually think this whole nostalgia of what sitcoms bring you into your house, things do come around. And my guess is that NBC’s decision to pick up a show that’s going to make a block of comedy on Friday nights ‑‑ ‘Fridays: We Are In Love On NBC,’ I mean, that’s an advertising feed. That’s how you build something.”
The Friday sitcom block Newlyweds will be part of is anchored by the Reba McEntire comedy Happy’s Place. NBC set a goal this past development season to find a companion for its breakout multi-camera hit, greenlighting two pilots, one of which, Newlyweds, went to series.
“The reason we are here is because Happy’s Place became such a happy place and people wanted to go there that they needed to, like, pair it with a show about love and friendship,” Curtis said. “I just think people want to have a good time in the comfort of their own home, and they want to turn on a network show and have laughs and have feelings. If that isn’t what sitcoms can do well, then I’m not sure what they do; but that’s what they do, and that’s why we love them.”
With multi-camera comedy in retreat across broadcast, Curtis hopes Newlyweds will help the genre make a comeback that will extend beyond Fridays on NBC.
“My guess is then Thursdays are going to start being that, and the next thing you know, NBC is going to look like they were geniuses of bringing back the thing that real people really want, and they want it for free,” she said. “They want to turn their television on and have that level of entertainment and laughter and a good feeling about who we are as a society. And I just think that it’s exciting that we get to do, and we are grateful to NBC for doing it.”
Daly chimed in to “slightly dispute the characterization that people in general think [sitcoms are] old‑fashioned,” noting that young people come to him to talk about his classic sitcom Wings which they had discovered and loved.
“So I think that there is an audience; it’s just a matter of us finding them and them finding us, and, hopefully, they will,” he said.
