Jenna Bush Hager Says NBC Will Decide on Pilot This Week

jenna bush hager says NBC has already shot her pilot, and the network will decide this week or next whether it gets picked up. The project, called Protection or In the Line of Fire, now moves from production into the narrow window where a filmed test episode either becomes a series or stops there.

Protection at NBC

“We have a pilot at NBC, which is really exciting. We’ve shot it,” Bush Hager said on the Thursday, April 30 episode of Today With Jenna & Sheinelle. She added, “We’ll find out this week, next week, if it’s gonna get picked up.”

Peter Krause and Hope Davis are starring in the pilot. Bush Hager is executive producing through her production company, Thousand Voices, after NBC announced in January that she would lead the project on that side of the camera.

White House twist

“It’s this kind of really funny, Scandal-esque [show]. It has a little bit of a White House twist, so I brought some of that,” Bush Hager said. She also described it as having “a little romance, but [also] family drama, which I think we’re all kind of desperate for, with some mystery.”

The show’s description gives the pilot a more procedural frame: when a U.S. Marshal falls in the line of duty, a seemingly cut-and-dry case turns into a deadly conspiracy. A family of law enforcement agents then becomes the target of a mysterious assassin, and the Thornhill family has to use a lifetime of protecting civilians and politicians to protect one another and bring the killer to justice.

Thousand Voices and next week

Bush Hager had already called the project “a tribute” to Secret Service members on the March 11 episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show, saying they “sacrificed a lot to hang out with my family and me.” That history gives NBC’s decision a cleaner business shape: this is not a vague development rumor, but a finished pilot with named leads and a specific pitch already in circulation.

The next week matters because it tells viewers, and the network, whether Bush Hager’s scripted move away from her daytime role gets a full run or stays a one-off test. For now, the project is in the only stage that counts: picked up or passed over.