It’s Great News indeed for actress Nicole Richie
The cast of NBC comedy Great News — about a local news producer whose mother joins the show as an intern — is about who you would expect: Briga Heelan, a rising star headlining her first network series; Andrea Martin, a well-known thespian and comedian; John Michael Higgins, longtime comic actor; Horatio Sanz of Saturday Night Live fame; and ... Nicole Richie?
While Richie is best known as The Simple Life reality star, her role as a quirky TV anchor in Great News has revealed that she’s also a great sitcom actor. Her character, Portia, alternates between deluded celebrity (“Are you taking those diet pills I sell? Don’t, I’m re-branding them as rat poison.”) and woke millennial (“Oh yeah, let’s cater to the old white guy. This is why I quit my podcast with Bernie Sanders.”) Richie artfully delivers her many one-liners, especially during the show’s news segments: “Next up, a Chicago homicide victim refuses to talk. What is she hiding? Stay with us.”
Perhaps more importantly for Richie’s future, this means she’s now officially a Tina Fey-Approved Funny Person, a powerful designation in Hollywood. Fey and Robert Carlock (30 Rock, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), are executive producers on Great News — which wrapped up its first season on May 23 — along with creator Tracey Wigfield, a former 30 Rock writer.
Richie’s comic chops even took producers by surprise. “(Nicole), was good, but everyone was kind of like, is she an actress?” Wigfield told the Daily Beast about the casting process; initially, Portia was “an older, Real Housewives-type figure,” until the network wanted someone younger paired with Higgins’ veteran news anchor. “But she was precise and had really good comic timing.”
Wigfield added that Fey also thought Richie was funny on Fox’s The Simple Life, where she starred with fellow socialite Paris Hilton. The series ran from 2005 to 2007, and showcased Hilton and Richie out of their glitzy Hollywood element as they travelled “real” America, meeting everyday people and doing manual labour.
At first, Kimrie Lewis-Davis of Scandal played the Portia character in the first version of the Great News pilot. When producers re-cast the role, Richie had to audition three times. Richie said she landed the part less than a week before she had to show up on set.
“I was intimidated on every level. First of all, these people had already shot a pilot, so they already knew each other,” Richie said in an interview with Refinery29. “So I was really walking in not only as the girl who just got her first acting role as a regular on a series, but also as just the new kid on the block.”
Richie’s character, who co-anchors The Breakdown with the always-cranky Chuck (Higgins), has been described as everything from “sometimes a shrewd social media genius, sometimes a clueless idiot” to “the dingbat co-host ... a breezy, demanding, clueless woman whose inane story ideas are given the green light.” Indeed, in the first season, Portia is adept in the ways of digital reporting (“What if we did a segment called ‘Am I Snapchatting my vacation wrong?’ ”).
But she has zero interest in traditional journalism, as she wonders about the definition of “a Walter Cronkite,” and embarks on an investigation where she goes “undercover as an ugly person.”
NBC recently renewed the show for a second season, airing in the network’s coveted Thursday night “Must See TV” lineup this fall — so Portia might get even more screentime as new viewers tune in and learn Richie is, actually, very funny.