Daniel Radcliffe spent a decade making everyone forget he was Harry Potter. Stage work in Equus and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Indie films like Swiss Army Man and Guns Akimbo. The genuinely great performance as Weird Al Yankovic in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. The strategy worked. Nobody thinks of Radcliffe as a franchise boy anymore.
Now he's doing a network sitcom on NBC, co-starring with Tracy Morgan, created by 30 Rock veterans Robert Carlock and Sam Means. Somehow this is the most surprising move yet.
In a TVLine interview, Radcliffe explained both the project and its appeal. He plays Arthur, a documentary filmmaker hired to follow Morgan's character - former pro football star Reggie Dinkins - as Reggie attempts a comeback from scandal. There is a neat meta-layer baked into the premise: Arthur is also attempting his own comeback, having had a public meltdown on a Marvel film set. Two men, two reinventions, one documentary project.
"Watching these two guys who at first have very little in common sort of figure out that they need each other," Radcliffe said, "and then... figure out that they actually like each other." The dynamic maps onto every great odd-couple comedy - which is not an insult, it is a structural compliment. The 30 Rock DNA is audible in the premise's precision.
Radcliffe's love for that show is genuine and specific. He praised its "hyper-specific, very smart, funny jokes" and its ability to balance rapid-fire wit with broader physical comedy - and he had particular affection for Morgan's 30 Rock character, Tracy Jordan, whose lines he can apparently quote at length. When an actor who has spent fifteen years doing everything possible to be taken seriously tells you he grew up wanting to work with someone from the comedy show he watched obsessively, the project's logic becomes clear.
The show premieres February 23 on NBC. Network sitcoms are a harder sell than they were twenty years ago - the landscape is more fragmented, the goodwill for new broadcast shows harder to accumulate. But Carlock and Means know the form, Morgan is generationally funny when given material worthy of him, and Radcliffe has spent a career proving he is not limited by where he started.
This is the kind of career bet you respect even before you know whether it pays off.
