The roles continue to pour in for Nia Long.
The actress, who currently recurs on Empire and is set to appear in the romance drama Life in a Year starring Jaden Smith, has been tapped to star in ABC’s The Goldbergs spinoff.
via TVLine:
As previously reported, the offshoot — which is currently in the pilot stage — will center on high school gym teacher Rick Mellor, a recurring character on “The Goldbergs”; Bryan Callen, who plays Mellor, is attached to star. The premise: Mellor and another high school teacher team up to act as father figures to the kids at their Philadelphia school.
Long, most recently seen in Lifetime’s “Beaches” remake, will play Lucy Winston, a single mother of three who’s worked at the same dead end job for the last seven years and needs a better life for her children, who are getting older and inching towards trouble. After begging her brother for a job at the Academy he runs (free tuition for three included), Lucy and her kids all have to adjust to a new life in a new school — but schools are somewhat the same all over the country, and many of the same problems (cliques, status, sports, substance abuse) haunt the hallowed halls of the William Penn Academy as in any other school in America (though it’s blessedly free of metal detectors).
Should the pilot be ordered to series, this will mark Nia’s return to ABC following last summer’s ill-fated Uncle Buck TV adaptation.
