MTV Announces Seven New Non-Music Series In Development

MTV announced their newest slate of upcoming television series in development, and not surprisingly anymore, none of them have anything to do with music. Leading the charge of new shows is an animated half-hour series called The Awesomes, written by Saturday Night Live Seth Meyers, about a gang of lazy superheroes, Billboard.biz reports. The makers of The Incredibles are probably already drafting up their inevitable lawsuit.

Also on the docket, and this sounds pretty awesome, is a TV series based on the Michael J. Fox cult hit Teen Wolf, which the network said would be a "reinvention of the classic '80s movie for today's audience." Also of note is the latest spin-off of Laguna Beach spin-off The Hills, as that show's Audrina Patridge is teaming with Survivor producer Mark Burnett for a new untitled reality show.

Perhaps looking to fill the void left after Nick Cannon's Wild N' Out, MTV is also working with Oscar winner Jamie Foxx on a new sketch comedy show. Also planned is a Greg The Bunny spin-off called Warren The Ape, a coming-of-age show about a down-and-out 15-year-old called Hard Times and an adaptation of a popular Argentinean musical drama called Patito Feo. "The most exciting thing about creating content for MTV is that you can paint across a broad canvas," MTV president of programming Tony DiSanto said. "This allows us to play with different genres. MTV is always evolving, and we are spreading our creative wings even further with this slate."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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