Tom Arnold To Headline New Comedy Pilot For… CMT?!

You know, some things in life just naturally go together. Chocolate and peanut butter. Hall and Oates. Guns and moon bounces. So when I heard Tom Arnold was going to be headlining a comedy pilot for Country Music Television AND that his character was a hardware store owner, I thought to myself, “Yep, that was bound to happen at some point.” Deadline gives us the lowdown:

CMT is getting another familiar name from its roster of unscripted series hosts to headline one of its first four scripted pilot presentations. Tom Arnold has been tapped to star in the untitled David Litt multi-camera comedy, a multi-generational show about a man (Arnold) seeking the empty nest and his family who is unwilling to let him have it.

Arnold’s character Joe Herman, the owner of a hardware store, is described as “salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, good-hearted, eager-to-please, optimistic, but sometimes overwhelmed by the chaos around him.” Litt wrote the script and is executive producing with Gene Stein and Nina Wass. The project also is referred to as Regular Joe, which also was the name of a short-lived 2003 ABC series by Litt, which he executive produced with Stein and Wass. Regular Joe had a very similar set-up to the CMT project, with the central character, hardware store owner Joe Binder, played by Daniel Stern.

So to recap: Tom Arnold will be starring in a comedy for CMT that appears to be a remake of a show Daniel Stern starred in for ABC that no one remembers. Well, okay then. This is CMT’s first foray into original scripted programming, and they appear to have taken the TBS route of appealing to folks in flyover states with standard comedies about the kind of frustrated dads Bill Engvall and Jim Belushi have already presented to you, the American TV viewer. But hey, they’ve got an audience to play to, and they’re gonna play to them.

I think there’s something encouraging about the fact that CMT is yet another cable network to go into original scripted programming. Maybe this Tom Arnold vehicle won’t set the world on fire, but it’s never a bad thing to have another channel offering new scripted programming. It grows the market. It gives you more viewing options and encourages competition. And it means that, down the road, CMT may find its proper niche for original programs and offer you something really cool. More variety is never a bad thing. Even when Tom Arnold is involved.

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