Aubrey Plaza sets her first writing project, animated comedy series Kevin

Aubrey Plaza came up as a beloved comic performer and, in her later career, a formidable dramatic actor as well. (Shout out to her menacing, memorable performance in Legion.) Now, she’s going to prove her chops as a writer with Kevin, a new animated series for Prime Video. Plaza will co-write the comedy with Joe Wengert (New Girl, Big Mouth), who will also serve as showrunner. It’s the first true television writing credit on Plaza’s impressive resume, and she’ll also produce the project with her Evil Hag Productions partner Dan Murphy.

Kevin will air on Prime Video. Per Variety, the series is about “a life-long housecat who decides that he doesn’t want to live with people anymore. Loosely inspired by a real break-up and the cat caught in the middle, Kevin dares to ask himself, ‘Is there a world where I don’t do the owner thing and am just… single for the rest of my life?’”

Kevin was apparently Wengert’s cat; in a statement, he said, “I am extremely excited to be working with Amazon and my old friends Aubrey and Dan on this show. The real Kevin was with me during some of my lowest moments. This show is my chance to thank him– by creating a world where he can find less of a total bummer situation for himself.” In their own statement, Plaza and Murphy said they were “thrilled to be working with Joe and Amazon to bring this cat’s story to the screen. We can’t wait for the world to meet Kevin!”

Plaza has come a long way from her breakout role on Parks And Recreation, which established a deadpan persona that bled into her public appearances. She’s created a diverse portfolio for herself since, earning critical acclaim for recent roles in the second season of The White Lotus and the 2022 film Emily The Criminal. (Plaza was also a producer for the movie, and will produce the upcoming television adaptation.) Most recently, she traveled to the Cannes Film Festival to support Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming film Megalopolis, in which she plays the incredibly named character “Wow Platinum.”

As a writer, though, her credits are scant. Plaza and Murphy penned a pair of children’s books, The Legend Of The Christmas Witch and The Christmas Witch Returns. As a member of the Uprights Citizen Brigade, she’s credited with writing some sketches for the UCB Comedy Originals show, and she co-wrote and co-created a comedy horror anthology, Nightmare Time, that didn’t end up getting picked up at TBS. Her sole other foray into this realm was writing and directing an episode of Cinema Toast, a Showtime series created by her husband Jeff Baena in which artists made new stories out of public domain footage from Old Hollywood classics. It’s exciting to see Plaza get the chance to flex this particular muscle in a more long-form setting, and an animated comedy seems perfectly suited to her sensibility.