Jamie Lee Curtis Says ‘Love’ Is at the ‘Core’ of Her New NBC Sitcom Newlyweds

Jamie Lee Curtis serves as an executive producer and costar in ‘Newlyweds,’ which premieres Friday, Oct. 23, on NBC

Jamie Lee Curtis hopes to spread the love with her new series.

The Oscar winner, 67, unveils Newlyweds Friday, Oct. 23, on NBC as an executive producer and star. Curtis tells PEOPLE she’s focused on delivering a show audiences will connect with. “I mean, ultimately at the core of this is love. This is free TV! You get to turn us on on Friday night at 8:30 on NBC. What we get to bring you is love, aspirational love,” she says.

“For all the Boomers out there, for all the single Boomers out there, for all the people that believe in the possibility of love, watching a real couple create this experience for you? It’s infectious.”

Billed as a “later-in-life love story,” the sitcom stars real-life newlyweds Téa Leoni and Tim Daly as free-spirited Jeanie and buttoned-up James, who marry impulsively after a whirlwind courtship. Leoni and Daly tied the knot in July 2025 after first meeting more than a decade prior on the set of Madam Secretary.

“Tim brought up earlier [that] the center of most sitcoms is family. So here you have family and love as a combo,” Curtis adds. “I just can’t think at this moment in our lives, in the universe, what’s more important than having some fun, getting older and making love?”

Curtis also stresses that the fruition of Newlyweds was “worth waiting for.” She’d been carrying around the idea since before the pandemic, she says.

“The idea was born on April 25, 2019, in New York in a limousine on my way into the city. An older man was the driver and said that he was divorced, but then he mentioned his new wife. When he said, ‘My new wife,’ literally … in that moment, I knew [there] was a sitcom about people in their 60s and 70s who hooked up and got married on a whim,” she says.

The story is one “very similar” to Curtis’ own with her husband of more than 40 years, Christopher Guest, she notes. “I saw his picture in a magazine, said I was going to marry him and married him four months later after never being alone together for more than 72 hours,” she recalls.

As for Curtis’ delight to now be working on the fully-realized series? “I couldn’t get a job on a sitcom, and now I can because I created one,” she quips.

Newlyweds premieres Friday, Oct. 23, at 8:30 p.m. ET on NBC and streams the next day on Peacock.

Via: People