NBC Orders U.S. Marshal Drama Pilot ‘Protection’ From Josh Safran & Jenna Bush Hager

NBC is hitting the ground running with a second pilot order less than two weeks into January. The network has greenlighted drama Protection, from Quantico creator Josh Safran, Today with Jenna & Sheinelle‘s Jenna Bush Hager and Universal Television.

Protection joins a reboot of The Rockford Files, which received a pilot greenlight earlier today. As Deadline reported, NBC is expected to order about 4 drama pilots and the same amount of comedy ones, including the Dan Goor and Luke Del Tredici’s PI half-hour, during the traditional January-May pilot window this year.

Per storied broadcast tradition, Lisa Katz, President of Scripted Content, NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, spent the holiday break reading pilot scripts, with the first two NBC pilot orders coming just a week after the end of the break.

In Protection, written by Safran, when a U.S. Marshal falls in the line of duty, a seemingly cut-and-dry case turns into a deadly conspiracy as a family of law enforcement agents become the target of a mysterious assassin. Bridging personal differences and crossing professional boundaries, the Thornhill family must use the expertise from a lifetime of protecting civilians and politicians to protect one another and bring the killer to justice … even if it means betraying their sworn code.

Safran executive produces with Bush Hager and her executive Ben Spector. Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group, is the studio. The project falls under the first-look deal Bush Hager has with Universal Studio Group for her Thousand Voices production company.

This marks the first major foray into scripted television for Bush Hager, the second former U.S. President’s daughter to enter the arena alongside Malia Obama who was a writer on Prime Video’s Swarm.

Bush Hager, a Daytime Emmy winner, originally joined Today in August 2009 as a correspondent and is a regular contributor to NBC morning program’s earlier hours in addition to co-hosting the third hour, recently rebranded as Today with Jenna & Sheinelle. She also is the founder of Today’s book club #ReadWithJenna. Since its launch in March 2019, more than 40 of the book club selections have become New York Times bestsellers.

Safran was creator, executive producer and showrunner of ABC’s Quantico, Netflix’s Soundtrack and HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot and served as executive producer and showrunner on NBC’s Smash. He also was a writer-producer on the original Gossip Girl series.