Kenan Thompson

OF ‘KENAN’ ON NBC

Since it first was announced a while ago, “Kenan” went through a lengthy development period. How was the creative process for you on it?

It was a long process, from starting with trying to find someone to settle in on an idea with, and me and (executive producer) Jackie (Clarke) talked for the first time over the summer like, I think, two years ago. We both had a similar idea of what we thought would be a good show that we haven’t seen before, and what also maybe fit the tone of stuff that we had ... the positive-father-figure type of thing. We had an opportunity to kind of sit down with it and flesh it out even further, so it’s been a long road, but apparently very necessary.

In “Kenan,” you’re playing a morning-show host, and also a widower father. Was it always the plan to blend those two aspects?

The family story was three different ideas from three different teams of people. Our original pilot was the same idea, with me in a different profession and a couple of different people in the cast. Then we pivoted to the morning-show profession, which I think is a very similar energy that people kind of would expect because of my “SNL” (“Saturday Night Live”) energy. And that’s where we’re at.

Especially given the times we’re in, are you looking at folding social issues into “Kenan”?

I don’t think we’re getting too political necessarily, but we definitely touch on the kind of mentality where we think everybody should be. We don’t necessarily have to have a Black Lives Matter episode, but we do want to show a nice, strong African-American cast as a family unit. There’s a lot of cultures involved in different people’s families, so that’s what the show kind of is, just reflecting what we have seen in a lot of different families.

“Debris” (NBC — series premiere, March 1)

When mysterious wreckage starts falling from the sky, a secretive international agency is tasked with figuring out what it is, where it came from, and most importantly, what it can do. British agent Finola Jones (Riann Steele) and American agent Bryan Beneventi (Jonathan Tucker) are partners who have very different styles. However, they have no choice but to trust each other. Every discovery is also a race against time, because shadowy outside forces want these powerful objects for their own nefarious purposes.