'70s Show star Valderrama embarks on new comedy

By James Hibberd and Kimberly Nordyke

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Wilmer Valderrama is back at Fox in a new comedy.

The network has ordered a one-hour pilot for "The Emancipation of Ernesto," in which the former star of "That '70s Show" plays an innocent man embarking on an epic quest to find his father amid a Los Angeles landscape polluted with excess. The story is said to be in the spirit of the Steve Martin comedy "The Jerk."

The script was written by Emily Kapnek, who created the Emmy-nominated Nickelodeon series "As Told by Ginger" and ABC's "Emily's Reasons Why Not."

"The writing jumped off the page; it has a really unique original tone," Susan Levison, senior vp comedy development at Fox. "It was a mix of real emotion with hard comedy. She has crafted a character we have never seen before."

One-hour comedies are increasingly popular on broadcast, but if "Ernesto" is greenlighted, the show would be the first of the format on Fox since "Ally McBeal." "There are a lot of wonderful places where we want the contours of this piece to go, we just didn't feel like it could fit in a half-hour format," she said.

"That '70s Show" ran for eight seasons on Fox until 2006. Valderrama has since appeared in feature films "Fast Food Nation" and "Unaccompanied Minors."

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter