Fake Empire’s Josh Schwartz & Stephanie Savage and Rina
Mimoun were among the WB/CW’s top writer-producer talent. Now the trio
have teamed at their new home, ABC Studios, where both Fake Empire and
Mimoun are under overall deals. Their collaboration is drama project
Sisterland, which has landed at ABC. Based on the best-selling novel
by Curtis Sittenfeld, Sisterland tells the story of identical twin
sisters born with paranormal abilities and how those abilities shape
their very different lives.
The After, the Amazon Studios pilot, which marks The X Files creator Chris Carter‘s return to series, has started building its cast. I’ve learned that Jamie Kennedy, Heroes alum Adrian Pasdar and Leverage‘s Aldis Hodge are the first actors to join the thriller, written and to be directed by Carter. The After, produced by Georgeville TV, the company of Marc Rosen and Reliance’s Motion Picture Capital, takes place at the moment of apocalypse. Kennedy will play a professional clown, Pasdar will play a successful Beverly Hills businessman, and Hodge will play an escaped convict who proclaims to be an innocent man who was railroaded.
Heroes creator Tim Kring is shepherding another drama project about teens with powers. The CW has put in development Exp, from Kring’s Tim Kring Imperative and Warner Bros. TV. Written on spec by up-and-coming scribes Zach Craley and Jarrett Conaway, Exp explores what happens when a foreign designer drug – engineered to make you faster, smarter, stronger and better in every way – is trafficked illegally into American high schools, weaving a morally and socially complex web that entangles politicians, law enforcement and teenagers looking for an edge in an ever-competitive and fast-paced world.
CBS has nabbed Zoo, a drama based on James Patterson‘s best-selling global thriller. The high-profile project, which has received a rare pilot production commitment for a pitch originating from sibling CBS TV Studios, hails from writer-producers Josh Appelbaum & Andre Nemec, Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg, informally referred to as Space Floor, and producers Cathy Konrad and James Mangold via their CBS Studios-based Treeline Film. Written by Appelbaum, Nemec, Pinkner and Rosenberg, Zoo is set amidst a wave of violent animal attacks sweeping across the planet. A young renegade scientist is thrust into a race to unlock the mystery behind this pandemic before time runs out for animals and humans alike.
NBC has given an an early pilot order to drama Tin Man, from top feature writer Ehren Kruger (The Ring and Transformers franchises). Set in the near future, Tin Man is a psychological crime thriller that focuses on a fugitive robot accused of first degree murder, who may hold the key to the future of human evolution, and the young female public defender forced to fight for his cause. Kruger knows a thing or two about bots in the future, having co-written the three Transformers sequels.
Relativity Television has partnered with Georgeville Television and actor/producer Bradley Cooper (Silver Linings Playbook) for Limitless, a scripted TV series based on Relativity’s hit 2011 movie starring and executive produced by Cooper.
The Limitless feature, which starred Cooper, Robert De Niro and Abbie Cornish, is a paranoia-fueled action thriller about an unsuccessful writer whose life is transformed by a top-secret “smart drug” that allows him to use 100% of his brain and become a perfect version of himself. His enhanced abilities soon attract shadowy forces that threaten his new life
The project, based on an Australian format, was developed at ABC last season when it had a put pilot commitment. Strange Calls centers on good-hearted, bumbling Boston cop Toby Banks, who is exiled to night duty on Nantucket island, where strange, unexplainable occurrences become the norm nine months out of the year. Working out of a creaky lighthouse on the outskirts of town, he is teamed with Gregor, the eccentric lighthouse keeper and local paranormal authority. The two make an unlikely crimefighting duo dealing with the “strange calls” that come into the station at night.
The network is developing Strange Fiction, a drama from the creator of
Eureka, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
Strange Fiction, which stems from a spec script, blends humor, heart
and horror and centers on a young book editor drawn into the world of
the supernatural by a reclusive and quite possibly insane paranormal
investigator.
The 400-year-old Roanoke Colony mystery is getting a galactic twist with Colony, a drama project at The CW from CBS TV Studios and the studio-based Kennedy/Marshall Co. Written by Ian Goldberg (Once Upon A Time), Colony is a thriller about a group of explorers sent to colonize Mars, willing to leave their lives behind to brave the dangers of another planet, and the terrifying reality they discover. It is inspired by the story of The Lost Colony, the 16th century British settlement on Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina, whose inhabitants vanished without a trace, sparking a slew of theories about their fate.
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