Ellie Kemper gets her own NBC pilot

May 9 update: NBC has passed on ‘Brenda Forever.’

From Entertainment Weekly:

Ellie Kemper has signed for the lead role in the NBC comedy pilot Brenda Forever. The flashback-filled pitch: “Stories from Brenda Miller’s past and present are interwoven to give a unique portrait of how a chubby, awkward, but incredibly confident 13-year-old grew up to be a 31-year-old woman who still marches to the beat of her own drum.”

Congratulations, Ellie!

David Rogers’ notes from The Office’s ‘Junior Salesman’

UPDATE: David sent me some behind-the-scenes photos!

David Rogers, director of last week’s episode, Junior Salesman, and long-time editor of The Office, was reading through some of your comments wondering about the “Erin tries to find her birth parents with Pete’s help” storyline, included in the original NBC episode summary.

Here’s what he said:

The Erin/Pete searching for her parents story was cut out of this episode just because we had so much great comedy and needed the time for Dwight and his freaky friends and how Jim and the gang reacted. (This happened to me before when I directed and edited Mafia and the Erin story of accidentally destroying Pam’s painting was cut out for time but it remained in the synopsis description of the episode!)

Most shows put together a first cut that’s maybe 3 to 5 minutes over the 22 minutes that they need to be for air. But because of the doc style of our show, we move faster than traditional single camera style shows, and therefore we can shoot more in a week than most half-hour comedies do. Hence our scripts are longer and our first cuts are a whopping 15 to 21 minutes over the 22 minute air length! Something’s gotta go!

And that’s why we often have such great and satisfying deleted scenes — they’re just cut out of the final episode due to time restraints. (Yes there are a couple of deleted scenes with Sensei Ira! And we’ve also got the weirdos playing paintball!)

We’ve got some great episodes coming down the pike. Andy returns next week! Jon Favreau directed a really terrific episode that airs the following week! And we’ve got some guest stars that I think the fans will really enjoy seeing…

Thanks, David! :)