Hold onto your Stetsons, country music fans! Reba McEntire is returning to her sitcom roots with ABC’s Malibu Country this fall, and yes, of course she plans to sing on the show.
Mirroring the Reba show in premise, this four-camera comedy comes at a time when showrunner Kevin Abbott thinks the genre is simply “hibernating,” ready to make a full-force comeback. Naturally, the star power of Reba will help with that!
What does Reba have to say about her new sitcom?
“Basically what we really are trying to show are the differences between Nashville and Malibu,” Reba told Celebuzz when we caught up with her at the Paley Center for Media’s ABC fall preview event this week.
“We are fish out of water, and my mom and I — played by Lily Tomlin — we’re trying to adjust and make sure the kids are as grounded as they can be,” she continued.
On the show, Reba is playing mom to teenagers (Justin Prentice and Juliette Angelo), and already in the pilot episode she runs into trouble when she finds her daughter making out with her next door neighbor’s kid. The show will pull from her life in all kinds of ways, including the adjustment period of entering a new town — and a new industry.
“We really dealt with this a lot when I first came to Los Angeles to shoot the Reba TV show, and I had an 11-year-old son who had to deal with all of this change from Nashville. I think it made him a stronger person, so I think we’re going to be using that, also,” Reba said.
Whether or not her now-grown son likes the idea of his adolescence retold on television, though, Reba just smirked that she’s “not going to tell him.”
The character of Reba in Malibu Country is a woman who gave up her own future in the music industry to see her husband succeed in that area, but now that she is older, wiser, and has kicked him to the curb for cheating on her, she’s giving it a go again. But as an artist herself, Reba doesn’t want to play a woman who succeeds right away. Where’s the fun in that, right? Comedy comes from shortcomings.
“Like when there are romances on a show, do you ever want to see them get married? No. It’s the struggle, the getting there,” Reba equated. “I asked my daddy one time — he was a world champion cowboy — I asked, ‘What was the best part: winning the championship, getting that buckle and that saddle, or the getting there?’ He said, ‘The getting there.’ That’s what we’re always trying to do — to keep that steady struggle going.”
And as she attempts to crack the door open, she will be tinkering around with music, so there will be ample opportunity to hear McEntire sing on the series.
“I want to sing a lot, because my fans would really want to see that and hear that. We’re working on songs. We [already] recorded a couple that are going to be on the TV show,” she revealed.
Though it is still early on in Malibu Country’s process and the emphasis is heavily on the family dynamic, Reba wouldn’t rule out a key potential guest star in her friend and fellow musician Kelly Clarkson who has talked a lot in the media about wanting to hang out on the Malibu Country set.
“She’s been so busy, and we’re just now starting [production], but she knows she has an open invitation any time she wants to come on,” Reba revealed.
Malibu Country premieres on ABC on November 2 at 8:30 PM.
Are you excited to see Reba back on sitcom television? Sound off in the comments below with what you hope to hear her sing on-screen!
