Wolfowitz and Riza to star in new FOX sitcom

by Aleister
Published: Monday, May 21st, 2007

Soon-to-be former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz and his gold-digging girlfriend Shaha Riza have just signed a deal with the FOX network for one season of a new sitcom based on their personal lives, with an option for renewal next year if all goes well.

“One might think that there really isn’t any fodder for a show there, but you have to think beyond the scandal at the World Bank and get to the heart of their relationship,” said the show’s producer, Steven Levitan. “The show will center on the couple’s home life and their daily squabbles, as they try to lead normal lives while employed in high-powered political positions. Really, it’s more an ongoing Odd Couple than the Clinton & Lewinsky one-off that USA produced for late-night.”

The Odd Couple reference is due to Wolfowitz and Riza’s seemingly disparate political leanings: Wolfowitz has been intimately associated with the Bush administration’s neoconservative, white-supremacist, apocalypse-inducing evangelical Christian philosophy, while Riza is a sophisticated and well-traveled Oxford graduate and a champion of women’s rights. “It’s a recipe for wackiness,” quips Levitan.

The show comes at a time when FOX could use a lift, as interest in its nonstop lineup of reality television has waned and the network has canceled Family Guy for the 53rd time this season, this time in favor of a show called Who Wants to be a Quadruple Amputee Transvestite?. FOX, which prides itself on shock value, green-lit the Wolfowitz project, called Conflict of Interests only after Levitan, on the phone with Dick Cheney, assured the programming board that he could procure no less than seven mutilated bodies of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi military personnel as a decorative nuance in the main characters’ living room.