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Philly’s Lee Daniels at work on #MeToo-themed project with Penn grad Whitney Cummings

According to Deadline, the pair are developing a half-hour comedy for Amazon that would be set on a college campus's ombudsman's office and would star Cummings

Comedian and actress Whitney Cummings speaks at Book Expo America, Thursday, June 1, 2017, in New York. Cummings, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, and West Philadelphia's Lee Daniels, of "Empire" fame, are working together to develop a new comedy for Amazon, reports Deadline
Comedian and actress Whitney Cummings speaks at Book Expo America, Thursday, June 1, 2017, in New York. Cummings, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, and West Philadelphia's Lee Daniels, of "Empire" fame, are working together to develop a new comedy for Amazon, reports DeadlineRead moreAP/File
    by Ellen Gray | Columnist
    Published 

West Philadelphia's Lee Daniels (Empire, Star)  is working with University of Pennsylvania-educated comedian, actress, and producer Whitney Cummings (Whitney, 2 Broke Girls) to develop a new half-hour comedy for Amazon that would star Cummings and touch on the #MeToo movement, reports Deadline.

The show would be about "the staff of the ombudsman's office at a college that navigates PC culture and the #MeToo climate," said Deadline, which described Cummings' character  as someone who "must reconcile the dissonance between different generations of feminism, and the struggle to reconcile our primal desires, and socially constructed identities with current ethical obligations regarding race, class and gender."

(Are you laughing yet?)

Cummings actually has some experience addressing some of those differences between generations, at least in comedy. She was one of the producers behind last spring's revival of Roseanne, though she'd been 6 when it first premiered in 1988. (She left the show before it was canceled following star Roseanne Barr's racist tweet, and doesn't appear to be  involved in the spin-off The Conners.)

And while she professed herself to be an admirer of Barr — "she always inspired me to tell the truth, no matter how ugly it is, and how offensive it might be, and how uncomfortable it might make people," she said after an ABC news conference in January — they didn't necessarily see eye to eye on politics.

In a roundtable discussion with the Hollywood Reporter that was published before the show's premiere, Cummings described herself as the "PC police" on Roseanne.

"I was the 'you can't say that anymore' and 'now this is the word we use' one. And they were like, 'Yeah, but that's not how people in this town at this age in this income bracket talk.'  And I learned, it's not about what we would say, it's about what they would say."

If the untitled pilot is picked up by Amazon, Daniels would direct, according to Deadline.