‘Eternally Yours’: The Story Of 11-Year-Old Script That Wouldn’t Die

For those lamenting the slow pace of the TV development process, how about one that spans 11 years? That is how long it took for Joe Port and Joe Wiseman‘s new CBS vampire comedy series Eternally Yours, starring Ed Weeks and Allegra Edwards. Their pilot script, written in 2015, got a table read in 2019, a development room in 2024, a pilot order in 2025, and a series pickup in 2026.

The 2019 table read was staged on Andrew Reich and Ben Blacker’s Dead Pilots Society podcast, with Weeks as the male lead. Six years later, he would be cast in the same role in the CBS pilot that went to series for 2026-27. The podcast helped keep Eternally Yours alive through the various twists and turns that included an animation incarnation.

The 2015 script of Eternally Yours also landed Port and Wiseman a job as developers and executive producers for CBS’ adaptation of the UK comedy series Ghosts. Next season, the duo will serve as executive producers and showrunners on Ghosts and Eternally Yours, which have a 22-episode and 20-episode order, respectively.

Here is the story of Eternally Yours, the first-ever busted script featured on Dead Pilots Society to subsequently make it to series. Its journey is intertwined with another vampire title, What We Do In the Shadows.

First Sale To CBS

Eternally Yours centers on vampire couple Charles (Weeks) and Liz (Edwards) whose once-passionate romance has devolved into a pulseless marriage after 500 years together. Port and Wiseman, a writing team since meeting as assistants on the UPN animated series Dilbert in 1999, first came up with the idea for the show in 2015.

At the time, they were not aware of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s movie What We Do In the Shadows, which had been released in the U.S. in February of that year, but were quickly alerted to it. “We watched it and loved it because it was incredible,” Port said.

As for how Eternally Yours came about, Port and Wiseman were developing something else when the conversation turned to their 16 years together as writing partners.

“We started talking about writing partnerships and the idea of a marriage and people stuck together forever, so the idea of a marriage on steroids, like vampires who never die, and what it would be like to be truly together forever is how we came up with that,” Port said.

The duo teamed with Two and a Half Men executive producers Eric and Kim Tannenbaum after working together on CBS’ Odd Couple reboot. All four were under overall deals at CBS Studios at the time.

“What we loved most about the kernel of this idea, which is a couple trapped in an endless marriage. It came from Joe and Joe, as a writing team, feeling like a married couple, and we loved the fact that it came in with the Tannenbaums, producers who not only are married, but work together,” CBS Studios’ longtime head of comedy Kate Adler said. “It was super relatable to just about everybody, married or otherwise, but we loved that it came from such a real place.”

The pitch went to the usual suspects at that time, the four broadcast networks. CBS Studios’ main buyer, sibling CBS, was the most interested and already had an existing relationship with Port, Wiseman and the Tannenbaums, so the project was set there for development in September 2015.

Eternally Yours had been conceived and sold as single-camera. While CBS introduced a single-camera comedy series during the 2015-16 season, Life In Pieces, its half-hour slate at the time was dominated by multi-camera sitcoms.

When pilot pickup time came in early 2016, Eternally Yours got a pass. Its format likely was a factor; CBS ultimately went with four new comedy series for the 2016-17 season, all of them multi-cam.

CBS Studios made a Hail Mary attempt, sending the finished script to other networks, broadcast and cable, including smaller outlets like TV Land, but there were no takers, with Eternally Yours headed to the dead pilot script graveyard.

That’s where it was found by Reich.

‘Dead Pilots Society’ Table Read

Like Port and Wiseman, Reich was a network comedy writer-producer and part of a writing team in the 2000s and 2010s with former writing partner Ted Cohen. The duo came out of Friends, where they rose to executive producers and co-showrunners and subsequently worked on a string of comedy series, creating the 2012 ABC sitcom Work It.

The same 2015-16 development season, during which Eternally Yours was bought, written and passed on, was brutal to Reich and Cohen too — they sold three projects and none of them got made.

“It’s just feeling bad, and there was one especially where I was just really feeling like, I just wish I’d gotten to hear it read out loud, I just wish I’d gotten to have a table read,” Reich said.

That’s how the idea was born for the Dead Pilots Society, which gives scripts developed by studios and networks but never produced “the table reads they deserve,” per its manifesto.

The podcast was launched in September 2016 with three table reads, including one for the rejected 2015-16 script Reich and Cohen were particularly fond of. It had two female leads for which the duo recruited Molly Shannon and Sarah Chalke.

Since then, Reich has been reaching out to well-known comedy writers — many of them friends of his — to get some of their favorite unproduced scripts, cast them and stage table reads that are taped for the podcast, often at The Hollywood Improv. In 2019, he approached Port and Wiseman about Eternally Yours and quickly got their blessing.

“It’s amazing that they do that, because it’s really fun,” Wiseman said. “Even if it doesn’t become a pilot and a series, it’s really nice to hear your pilot that you’ve worked so hard on come to life.”

It was Reich who suggested Weeks for Charles. A couple of other actors had passed on the part, and Reich was friends with The Mindy Project alum who had done another Dead Pilots Society table read for him. (This is not a paying gig; the actors who participate in the table reads volunteer their time and do it for free.)

“We weren’t thinking it was a British guy for some reason but after hearing him do it, it seemed like it was written like that,” Port said about their reaction to hearing the Charles character interpreted by Englishman Weeks in his native accent.

The rest of the table read cast included Briga Heelan as Liz; she was brought in by Port and Wiseman, who had just worked with her on a pilot, as well as Matt Walsh playing one of the children, Asif Ali, Vella Lovell, Tony Cavalero, Yassir Lester, Mindy Sterling, Brendan Scannell and David Fumero.

“It was a fun night, and it was very useful to us,” Port said about attending the table read. “In the years to come, we started using that recorded table read as a calling card for Eternally Yours.”

The table read made an impression on Reich too.

“There’s pilots we’ve done that I think are great, but I totally see why they didn’t get on, they’re just too out there, there’s other issues, but they’re still worth doing a table read of,” he said. “But this was one where it was like, oh, this was so good, and I can totally see it as a show.”

While the Dead Pilots Society table reads are largely designed to give writers closure, Port and Wiseman would go on to use theirs as a valuable tool, not only sending it out to people but also using the feedback to punch up their script over the coming years.

‘Ghosts’ & Animated ‘Eternally Yours’

Taped in late 2019, the Eternally Yours episode of Dead Pilots Society was released on March 17, 2020, just a couple of days before the world was shut down by the pandemic.

Also in 2019, the Eternally Yours script helped Port and Wiseman land the job of adapting the UK series Ghosts, another single-camera supernatural comedy for CBS. They were top of mind for both the network and CBS Studios who pitched the duo to co-producing entities Lionsgate TV and BBC Studios L.A. (Port and Wiseman’s writing samples at the time also included an out-there spec they had handed to the studio in May 2016, shortly after Eternally Yours’ initial rejection, for People vs. O.J. Simpson Episode 201, envisioning a comedic second season of Ryan Murphy’s limited series about the Simpson trial.)

Ghosts was picked up to pilot in February 2020, just a few weeks before Dead Pilots Society‘s Eternally Yours episode was released, but its production was delayed by the pandemic.

Meanwhile, looking to capitalize on the attention Eternally Yours received from the table read, CBS Studios set out to repackage the show as an animated comedy, using the podcast table read as part of the pitch, along with Port and Wiseman’s script and concept art.

“We were able to hire an animator, Arthur Jones, who was great,” Wiseman said. “He did drawings of all the characters and big pictures of the family together.”

By the time the project was ready to be taken out in 2021, Port and Wiseman were working on Ghosts, which had been picked up to series in March of that year. The two did some Zoom pitch meetings for the animated version from a trailer on the set of Ghosts in Montreal.

Once again, What We Do In The Shadows came into play, this time FX’s series version of the movie, which had premiered in 2019 but broke out in a major way in 2021 with its third season that earned the vampire show its first Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy nomination.

And once again, there were no takers for the animated Eternally Yours, with Hulu reportedly referencing the fact that it already had a vampire comedy with What We Do In the Shadows, which streams on the platform.

Looking back, Port is relieved by the outcome.

“The story of this pilot, and series now, is that things worked out for a reason,” he said. “Even as we were pitching it as the animated thing, we were starting to do Ghosts. It hadn’t premiered yet but once that came out and did well, I was kind of relieved we hadn’t sold it as this animated thing, because I was like, this seems like such a good Ghosts companion. It seems like there’s an appetite for this single-camera genre, comedy with heart, for network TV now.”

‘Eternally Yours’ CBS Rebirth

While CBS Studios executives would periodically bring up Eternally Yours in meetings with CBS executives, the project’s comeback did not kick off in earnest until around April 2023, a few months after Amy Reisenbach was named CBS Entertainment President in November 2022. She championed the script which, a year later, emerged as a top comedy contender at the network. A development room was commissioned in August of that year, followed by a pilot order in July 2025.

The series’ second stint in CBS development took longer as Port and Wiseman juggled it alongside their showrunner duties on Ghosts, now headed into its sixth season. The Dead Pilots Society podcast made a cameo during the process with an unexpected January 2025 Eternally Yours episode re-release in the wake of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires.

“It was really a sentimental favorite of mine,” Reich said. “In fact, the one time we’ve done a rerun, it was January of last year. With the fires and everything, it was just too hard to get an episode out. And so the one rerun we’ve ever done was Eternally Yours.”

While the rerun did not necessarily impact the TV show’s momentum, the podcast table read did influence the casting of the Eternally Yours pilot. Port and Wiseman, who kept hearing Weeks’ voice as Charles in their heads, invited him and Heelan to audition for the roles they had performed at the table read. (The producers wanted to bring others too but a lot of them were unavailable, like Ali, who stars on Hulu’s Deli Boys, Lovell, who is a series regular on Fox’s Animal Control, and Cavalero, who was a series regular on CBS’ DMV.)

“Both Ed and Briga read, and they both did fantastic, Briga is an incredible actress,” Wiseman said. “Allegra Edwards, who ultimately got the part, just came in and made it undeniable. But having Ed and Briga in was fantastic.”

Like Weeks and Heelan, Edwards was invited to test for Eternally Yours because of a pre-existing connection.

“She was in two or three episodes of Ghosts, and was fantastic,” Wiseman said. “Everyone loved working with her, she was inventive. So, yeah, she was very much on our radar.”

The cast of CBS’ Eternally Yours, which Reisenbach calls “a big hearted, clever take on relationships, family and the fact that eternal love takes work,” also includes Helen J. Shen, Jaren Lewison, Parker Young, Rose Abdoo, Tristan Michael Brown and Shylo Molina.

Manifesting Resurrection

Earlier this month, Eternally Yours was picked up to series by CBS 11 years after Port and Wiseman first came up with the idea, 10 years after getting the first rejection from the network, 6 years after the script was featured on the Dead Pilots Society podcast and 3 years after the project re-entered development.

“For us, Eternally Yours was a project that never went away, it was merely hibernating,” Adler said. “We were always deeply in love with it, I guess you could say our love was eternal. We always promise creators we won’t give up on their projects, and we remain hopeful that a great project will ultimately find a home. Obviously, no one knew this one would take 11 years!” 

Port and Wiseman, who have had their fair share of rejected pilots, also thought there was something special about Eternally Yours.

“There’s a lot of dead pilots, but this one felt like it kept trying to come back; every few years, the studio would ask us about it and say, what about this?,” Wiseman said. “Most shows don’t go, and most dead pilots don’t go, so I can’t say I knew this was going to happen but it did feel like people were supporting this project for a long time.”

Befitting the supernatural nature of Ghosts and Eternally Yours, Port got a premonition once the former got off the ground.

“I have a picture in my home office of the Ghosts poster,” he said. “I moved it over to the left, and I left an empty space for it for the past few years because I was envisioning putting up an Eternally Yours poster next to it.”