Pauley Perrette was a CBS mainstay for well over a decade thanks to her tenure as forensic scientist Abby Sciuto on NCIS. Perrette departed the series at the end of Season 15, and the show simply hasn't been the same without her, although her replacement has more than stepped up. Well, Abby may not be coming back to NCIS any time soon, but Perrette is returning to CBS as star of a brand new show, which officially got its series order.
The new show is called Broke, and it will follow a trust fund baby who has to make some changes to his and his wife's life after being cut off from his father. He and his wife have no choice but to move in with her estranged sister, Jackie, in her Reseda home, where the sisters must reconnect.
Pauley Perrette will play Jackie, with Jaime Camil of Jane the Virgin playing Jackie's brother-in-law, Miguel. Natasha Leggero, Izzy Diaz, and Antonio Corbo also star.
News of the series order (via TV Guide) comes just over two months after an order came down for a pilot. The brass at CBS must have been happy with what they saw! No details are currently available about when in the 2019-2020 TV season Broke will premiere or how many episodes are part of the initial series order, but details should be forthcoming soon as the 2018-2019 TV seeason winds down.
Pauley Perrette is of course best known for her role as Abby on NCIS, and while Abby did provide some of the lightheartedness of the series, nobody would call NCIS a comedy by any stretch of the imagination. Broke should allow Perrette to stretch her acting muscles and show even more of what she's capable of.
Given that Pauley Perrette became iconic on CBS due to her work as Abby on NCIS, there is the question of whether people will struggle to see Jackie when they look at Perrette on Broke. The good news is that Abby's look was iconic as well, and she was certainly a one-of-a-kind character. Even though few details are available about Jackie, it's probably safe to say that she's not Abby 2.0.
If Broke is a hit for Pauley Perrette, she'll be the latest in a line of actors who left long-running CBS procedurals to anchor a new CBS show. Michael Weatherly left NCIS at the end of Season 13, then returned in the fall as star of Bull, which was just renewed for a fourth season. Shemar Moore left Criminal Minds at the end of Season 11 then was back in primetime CBS the next year as star of S.W.A.T. His show was just renewed as well.
CBS could probably use another strong comedy in its lineup, all things considered. The end of The Big Bang Theory means the beginning of a new comedic era on the network, even if Young Sheldon is still going for at least another couple of seasons and another Big Bang spinoff could happen. Could Broke be the network's next sitcom hit? Only time will tell.
