TV Line is reporting that Champions alum Anders Holm, The Haves and the Have Nots‘ Tika Sumpter, and newcomer Arrica Himmel have joined ABC’s Black-ish backdoor spinoff pilot. Holm and Sumpter will be playing the father and mother to a pre-teen version of Rainbow Johnson, who will be portrayed by Himmel.
Set to air as a regular Black-ish episode later this season, the untitled pilot follows a 12-year-old Bow growing up as an emotionally and intellectually brilliant yet confused and awkward biracial young woman in the ’80s.
In addition to his role on the NBC comedy, Holm’s television credits include Workaholics, The Mindy Project, and Happy Together, while Sumpter has appeared on the likes of The Game, Gossip Girl, and One Life to Live. They join a cast that includes Gary Cole (Fam), Ethan William Childress (The United States of Tomorrow), Mykal-Michelle Harris (Big Little Lies) and Christina Anthony (Key and Peele).
The untitled Black-ish spinoff joins a comedy pilot slate for ABC that includes Happy Accident, which stars Matt Walsh, JoAnna Garcia Swisher, and Vanessa Williams; Nana, about a widower whose mother-in-law moves in with him to help raise her granddaughters; United We Fall, a multi-cam starring Jane Curtin; an untitled Hannah Simone comedy about how life experience brings a directionless daughter and her father back together; an untitled Jessica Gao comedy about a first-generation Chinese-American woman who becomes sole inheritor to her grandmother’s fortune; an untitled Leslie Odom Jr. comedy centering on a married couple who has to balance their blended family with a ministry they run; and Woman Up, starring Mary Elizabeth Ellis.
