The Year of Living Biblically: CBS Buys Comedy from Johnny Galecki & Patrick Walsh

Deadline reports CBS has bought The Year of Living Biblically comedy from producer Johnny Galecki and writer Patrick Walsh. The project is based on A.J. Jacobs’ best-selling book of the same name.

The Big Bang Theory star will executive produce through his Alcide Bava Productions, which is based at Warner Bros. Television. The single-camera comedy features, “…a modern-day man at a crossroads in his life who decides to live according to the Bible.” Galecki and Walsh are executive producing with Spencer Medof and Alcide Bava’s Andrew Haas.

Walsh is a consulting producer on 2 Broke Girls. Early in his career, he wrote for the Rob & Big TV show, as well as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Here is more on AJ Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically book, from Amazon:

From the bestselling author of The Know-It-All comes a fascinating and timely exploration of religion and the Bible. A.J. Jacobs chronicles his hilarious and thoughtful year spent obeying―as literally as possible―the tenets of the Bible.

Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in headfirst and attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. But also to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to play a ten-string harp; to stone adulterers.

The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal and will make you see history’s most influential book with new eyes.

Jacobs’s quest transforms his life even more radically than the year spent reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica for The Know-It-All. His beard grows so unruly that he is regularly mistaken for a member of ZZ Top. He immerses himself in prayer, tends sheep in the Israeli desert, battles idolatry, and tells the absolute truth in all situations—much to his wife’s chagrin.

Throughout the book, Jacobs also embeds himself in a cross-section of communities that take the Bible literally. He tours a Kentucky-based creationist museum and sings hymns with Pennsylvania Amish. He dances with Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and does Scripture study with Jehovah’s Witnesses. He discovers ancient biblical wisdom of startling relevance. And he wrestles with seemingly archaic rules that baffle the twenty-first-century brain.

Jacobs’s extraordinary undertaking yields unexpected epiphanies and challenges. A book that will charm readers both secular and religious, The Year of Living Biblically is part Cliff Notes to the Bible, part memoir, and part look into worlds unimaginable. Thou shalt not be able to put it down.

 

Jacobs gave a TED Talk on The Year of Living Biblically, back in 2007. Watch it.

 

 

Have you read The Year of Living Biblically? Do you think it could work as a TV series comedy? Who would you cast in it? Let us know, below.