Though it isn’t news around town that former Statesman Journal columnist Kelly Williams Brown’s first book “Adulting: How To Become a Grown-Up in 387 Easy(ish) Steps” based on her blog AdultingBlog.com is due out in May on Grand Central Publishing, it is news that the book will be the premise for a new Fox pilot. The show will be written by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein (writers for the films The Vow and Valentine’s Day) under J.J. Abrams’ Warner Brothers-affiliated Bad Robot Productions tag.
Brown said the pilot will be a fictionalized version of the book. “Some of the characters are familiar to me, and some of them are made up,” said Brown. “I can’t say much of the structure of the show yet. I think they came up with a super-clever, super-awesome way to capture the spirit of the show.”
The announcement came via a slew of industry news feeds earlier this month, but the recently departed former Salemite said the process has been in the works for more than a year.
“When I went to the Willamette Writers Conference (in August 2011) one of the agents there was really excited about it as a TV show,” said Brown. “One of my friends was working for United Talent Agency, and said, ‘Listen, before you take that other offer, let me take it to Dana Borowitz and Adam Biren (agents at UTA).”
Brown said that the project took on a life of its own from there, with the show concept gaining interest from several studios before the columnist and her management settled on Warner Brothers and Bad Robot after a visit to Los Angeles.
“I had this amazing talk with the people that were in the meeting (at Bad Robot),” said Brown. “At the core of the book is the idea that we aren’t grown-ups and that we should be and there is something wrong with us for not being so… and that other people are OK and we’re not. At Bad Robot they really got it.”
