Arianna Huffington To Inspire and Exec Produce Friends-Like Sitcom

Arianna Huffington has already appeared on television in several incarnations: panelist, game show guest (Hollywood Squares), parodied political figure (Saturday Night Live), and voice actor (The Cleveland Show), and now her life will be used as the inspiration for a new Friends-like sitcom that the pundit will executive produce. I see the character as a spotlight hungry cross between Monica and Phoebe, who finds brief but bisexuality-interrupted love with a millionaire, played by Tom Selleck.

The Huffington Post maven has joined Friends scribe Greg Malins to develop a political sitcom called Freshmen for ABC. The series will revolve around "three newly elected members of Congress -- two men and one woman," -- who wind up sharing an eclectically decorated Washington, D.C. apartment and share a revolving door of lovers and fat-suit-aided flashbacks. Well, we're not sure about the flashbacks but Malins revealed that the characters will struggle to balance their different party affiliations and varying romantic obligations (one single, one divorced, one married).

Malins, who currently executive produces How I Met Your Mother, says that the partnership grew out of a meeting with Huffington and the Huffington Post's founding editor, Roy Sekoff: "They threw out some ideas, and I even stole from Arianna's life and put it in the show."

20th Century Fox TV is set to produce the multi-camera half hour comedy. Malins will pen the script and share executive producing credits with Sekoff and Huffington. Complaints about Huffington's growing television star should be forwarded to Seth MacFarlane, who cast her as the voice of Arianna the Bear in his new series The Cleveland Show.

Arianna Huffington sets ABC TV series[Hollywood Reporter]