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 acting prospects, 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 its first season on Tuesday night — 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.”
