• Christopher Walken will grab the hammy role of Captain Hook in NBC's new live version of Peter Pan, the network's follow-up to its hugely successful live musical for this past holiday season, The Sound of Music. Robert Greenblatt, NBC's top entertainment executive, announced the casting of Walken on Sunday in Los Angeles at an annual gathering of television critics. Greenblatt cited Walken's early experience as a song-and-dance man as well as his numerous well-received appearances as a guest host of Saturday Night Live. NBC plans to mount the production, Peter Pan Live!, in December. The network still needs to find a Peter. Greenblatt had no announcement on that front, although he did confirm that the network had pursued Kristen Bell (Frozen) but could not work out a schedule for her because of her commitment to the Showtime series House of Lies. Greenblatt did say that NBC would stick to the tradition of hiring a female star for Peter, after originally thinking that a man might be considered for the part.

• Bill Cosby could be returning to NBC with a new comedy as soon as next summer. The series, described as a "classic, extended-family sitcom" with Cosby as the patriarch, is in the writing stage, NBC executives said at Sunday's session of the summer TV critics' tour in Los Angeles. It was first announced in January. Cosby, 77, has a long history with NBC, including his seminal The Cosby Show, which became a smash hit 30 years ago and helped rescue a network then at the bottom of the ratings. It ran for eight seasons. After that, Cosby headlined a sitcom at CBS, among other series. If the new Cosby project isn't ready for next summer, it could be a contender for fall 2015. Another veteran NBC star, Michael J. Fox, returned to the fold last fall. But despite his breakout success in Family Ties in 1982, The Michael J. Fox Show proved to be a flop and was canceled this spring. Unlike the flamed-out Fox show, the coming Cosby venture will use multicameras and will be filmed in front of a studio audience, a format that has lost ground at NBC, where single-camera comedies like 30 Rock, The Office and Parks and Recreation have thrived.

A Section on 07/15/2014