Early this month, Andy Samberg announced he’d be leaving “Saturday Night Live” after seven seasons on the sketch comedy institution. Usually, this means a performer intends to pursue a movie career (whether that movie career will participate is another issue), and Samberg does have “That’s My Boy,” with fellow SNL alum Adam Sandler, opening this Friday, Sundance pick “Celeste and Jesse Forever” out in August and “The To Do List” (with Aubrey Plaza) in the hopper.
But Samberg’s also already got a new TV project in the works, and it’s British — BBC three announced today that he’ll be starring opposite Welsh comedian and actor Greg Davies (of “The Inbetweeners”) in “Cuckoo,” a six-part comedy series that’ll shoot this summer and air in the U.K. later this year.
“Cuckoo” focuses on Midlands couple Ken (Davies) and Lorna (Helen Baxendale) as they find out, to their horror, that their young daughter (Tamla Kari) has in her gap year travels met and gotten married to “self-appointed spiritual ninja” Cuckoo (Samberg). According to the the BBC:
Cuckoo is every parent’s worst nightmare – a slacker full of outlandish, New Age ideas. Ken and Lorna have no choice but to welcome him into their family home – and if every Englishman’s home is his castle, then this hippie has stormed Ken’s fortress and plundered everything, most unforgivably, his princess.
The show’s created and written by Robin French and Kieron Quirke and will be directed by Ben Taylor, and while it doesn’t yet have a U.S. broadcaster, it’s hard to imagine with Samberg on board that it won’t get picked up by a network here.
Here’s Samberg giving poncho-wearing a test-run in SNL Digital Short “Ras Trent”:
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