Amazon Studios has struck a first-look production deal with Grammy-winning artist Lizzo, the company announced Thursday during its virtual TCA press tour presentation. 

Lizzo appeared along with Amazon Studios co-television heads Albert Cheng and Vernon Sanders to announce the deal. Lizzo co-starred in the 2019 theatrical film Hustlers. 

“Lizzo is one of the most exciting, creative, joyful artists in the industry, and it is such a pleasure to announce this new deal with her,” said Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios in a statement. “She has such a unique perspective and we’re so excited to hear her ideas for new content that our Prime Video customers are sure to love.”

In other Amazon Studios news, the company will develop a series version of the 1992 baseball film A League of Their Own, with Broad City's Abbi Jacobson starring and servicing as executive producer for the series along with Will Graham (Mozart in the Jungle.) 

“There’s no crying in baseball, or at Prime Video,” said Sanders. “Will and Abbi have taken a classic movie, reimagining it for a new generation with new characters and their own fresh, modern vision on a timeless story of big dreams, friendship, love, and, of course, baseball. We’re so excited to partner with Sony to bring this emotional, exciting new series to our Prime Video customers around the world.”

Comedy Central has inked a comprehensive development deal with Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, creators, stars and showrunners on Broad City, with a ‘first look’ at content created and/or developed for television by the pair, both together and independently. 

The deal extends across all of Comedy Central parent Viacom’s TV networks.  

Broad City returns for its fifth and final season in early 2019, the network said

“Broad City’s Abbi and Ilana may appear to be aimless and full of hair-brained schemes, but Abbi and Ilana IRL have proven to be stellar creator/writer/performer/director/producers,” said Kent Alterman, president of Comedy Central. "Their supreme focus on telling new stories, in new worlds with new talent, is nearly scary."

Glazer and Jacobson said: “Broad City has been our baby and first love for almost 10 years, since we started as a web series. It’s been a phenomenal experience, and we’ve put ourselves into it completely. Broad City’s always had a spontaneous pace and feeling, and ending after season five honors that spirit. We are very excited to bring new voices and points of view to Comedy Central and continue our collaboration together in new ways.”

Three projects already in development at Comedy Central under the new deal include Mall Town USA, Platinum Status and Young Professionals.

Mall Town USA is an animated comedy that follows the afterschool misadventures of a 13-year-old girl navigating the complexities of life in the classic microcosm of American culture that is The Mall. Mall Town USA is written and created by Gabe Liedman and executive produced by Jacobson and Glazer.

Platinum Status is set in the hipster-heavy east side of Los Angeles, telling the story of professional back-up singer Noah (Eliot Glazer), a gay guy who’s always felt left out of the “community.” And after he’s dumped by his boyfriend of 10 years, Noah rebounds in the least likely way: by hooking up with a woman.

Eliot Glazer will write and executive produce and Ilana Glazer will also executive produce, along with Principato Young’s Peter Principato and Brian Steinberg and Electric Avenue’s Will Arnett and Marc Forman.

Young Professionals is about a young White House speechwriter, David Litt. Inspired by Litt’s coming-of-age in our nation’s capital, Young Professionals follows five housemates growing up in the hopelessly absurd world of Washington, D.C.

Young Professionals is written by and executive produced by Litt, with Jacobson and Glazer also executive producing.

New Comedy Central president Kent Alterman, who earlier this month took over for departing network head Michele Ganeless, inherits a network that has struggled of late from a ratings perspective but is being looked upon by Viacom CEO Philipe Duaman to help spur the company’s financial fortunes.

Alterman recently spoke to Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead to discuss the network’s brand, its appeal to millennials and the struggles of its late-night franchises The Daily Show With Trevor Noah and The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore.

Related:MCN Original Video: Kent Alterman discusses the evolution of "The Daily Show" under Trevor Noah

MCN: How would you define the Comedy Central brand?

Kent Alterman: I’ll start by how our audience defines it, which is that it’s the No. 1 brand in comedy across all platforms. For me, what unifies all of our talent and content that we put out there is that they bring a very distinct point of view and voice to what they do that generally shares some degree of relevance, intelligence and an ability to reflect the world back at our audience in a way that gives them a break from the world.

MCN: You’re coming in at a time when the network’s ratings have been declining for some time. How do you view the network’s ratings performances and what can be done to curtail viewership declines?

KA: The entire industry is facing the same challenges, especially in reaching our young millennial audience. Viewing behaviors are changing, so we’re pursuing dual tracks.

We’re tending to the linear ratings – our audience consumes original content, and reruns don’t mean so much anymore, so we’re looking at ways to have more and better content.

We’re also making sure that we not only make our content available on all platforms, but also that we’re creating original content that is conceived and executed with these different platforms in mind so that it feels more organic. We were the only entertainment channel to be part of Snapchat Discover and we’ve been doubling down on how much original content we’ve been creating for that platform. It also affords us a development pipeline in the sense of making more bets with emerging talent and having more ways to working with talent in general on different platforms so that we can open up the aperture of our talent development.

MCN: Having said that, what would you consider to be the network’s core shows?

KA: The good news for us is that we’ve been having this great run of shows like South Park, Tosh 2.0 and The Daily Show, which has been an institution. We don’t have Jon [Stewart] but we’re bullish on Trevor. The Daily Show under Trevor Noah is the No. 1 late night show with male millennials and second overall after [The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy] Fallon. It’s been experiencing several months of repeated growth, so all the signs are pointing the right way, and creatively Trevor is taking the ball and running with it – we’re really pleased with his evolution.

There are other shows that are incredibly popular including Broad City, Inside Amy Schumer, Drunk History, Another Period,Nikki Glazer and so on. Ultimately what we feel gratified by is that in the last several years we’ve had a great run in introducing new talent, and they are all resonating with our audience.

MCN: You mentioned The Daily Show, and obviously a lot has been written about the show’s declining ratings as well as those of The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore since Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert left the respective shows. From your perspective, how have those shows performed with their new hosts and what if anything can be done to get ratings for the shows back to prior levels?

KA:  I think you have to look at a few things. It’s not like we replaced those shows at a time when there was stability in the marketplace of our business. It coincided with a period of incredible disruption in our business, and so its almost an unfair comparison; its not apples to apples. Even if you look at our late shows now and you include all the platforms where people are watching complete episodes – whether its on our website or our app or Hulu – the numbers are really significant, so it’s a tough comparison. What we care about the most is our fans and how [the shows] are resonating with our fans, and we try to keep our eye on that ball.

MCN: What are the biggest challenges the network is facing today?

KA: We’re living in a very tumultuous, disruptive time in our industry, and so I think we’re all facing the same challenges. No one knows how it's all going to settle out, and for the most part we try to keep our eye on what’s most important, which is our talent and our content. No matter what changes come in our industry, the thing that will never change is the importance of having content that resonates for our audience.

MCN: You mentioned programming for multiple platforms. How much does the digital platform influence the content development and distribution decisions you have to make?

KA: We’re trying to be very holistic about development and not so much separate linear with multiplatform distribution, but just continue to serve all masters simultaneously. We don’t just produce our content and then chop it up and distribute it on other platforms. We’re really expanding our aperture to work with different people and develop content that is targeted to different platforms because, ultimately, we are led more than anything else by our audience, and our audience is consuming content in different ways on different platforms, so we want to be able to meet them where they are.

PASADENA, Calif. — Comedy Central has picked up additional seasons of Inside Amy Schumer and Broad City, the network said Wednesday at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour.

Inside Amy Schumer was renewed for season five, while Broad City was given a fourth and fifth season.

Season four of Inside Amy Schumer will premiere in April.

Broad City returns to the network for its third season Feb. 17.

In HBO’s season-two trailer for Silicon Valley, a hulking, Birkenstock-wearing computer programmer grabs an enormous bong and fires it up to the relentless strains of Danny Brown’s “Smokin’ & Drinkin.’”

The series, which returned April 12, is but one of many premium, basic-cable and broadcast shows in which weed plays into the story line in one form or another. In Comedy Central’s Broad City and Workaholics; Showtime’s Episodes; IFC’s Maron; and even A&E’s Bates Motel, where the local town is run by a weed cartel, getting high is just something people do. On a fairly regular basis. And the act is not just implied or covered by a jump-cut to the after-effects; characters are casually toking away on screen.

Download the 4/20 timeline.

With 23 states and Washington, D.C., having legalized marijuana in one form or another, TV programming has gone to pot as well. Since the earliest references to weed in scripted TV shows to today, pot-related story lines have evolved from “Protagonist smokes weed — with disastrous results” to “with nostalgic results” to “with comic results” to, essentially, just “Protagonist smokes pot.” It’s tangential to the results.

Is TV merely reflecting the nation’s changing attitudes about pot or are we a nation under TV’s influence? In an effort to answer this 4:20-inspired question — that being the legendary time of day stoners would gather after school to get high, making the date April 20 a totem on the stoner calendar — Multichannel News presents this “4/20 Timeline” looking at the concurrent evolution of pot and plot.