Ray Richmond is contributing to Deadline’s TCA coverage.
At a late Friday afternoon panel session promoting A&E’s forthcoming summertime western saga Longmire, the question was asked as to whether the success of FX’s Justified perhaps smoothed the path wheels for Longmire to see the light of primetime. Exec producer John Covony answered succinctly: “The short answer is no.” Why not? “Well, in Hollywood, some ideas are gestating as others are coming to life.” He added that while he’s happy that Justified “helped to make people think about westerns,” he made the point that Justified star Timothy Olyphant and Longmire lead Robert Taylor were quite different in both style and substantive approach to their roles. Exec producer Greer Shephard went further, suggesting that Olyphant’s character “is a man tortured and driven by demons” while Taylor’s is defined by “love and loyalty.” She also doesn’t believe that Justified is even a true western, she thinks it’s more of “a Southern Gothic show.” But Longmire — “The integrity and moral steadfastness of Walt Longmire are tentpoles of the classic American cowboy.”
That may well be true. But this is also true: Taylor, who portrays Longmire, isn’t even American but Aussie. Someone wondered why it seems that more and more Australian actors are snatching the all-American alpha male roles away from U.S. performers. Shephard explained: “To be honest, a trait that was very, very hard to find” in the casting process “was humility. And there are a lot of metrosexuals as well” among American actors who auditioned. Where have you gone, Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford?
Broadcast networks’ infatuation with lower-license-fee internationally produced drama series, which began during the run-up to the 2007 writers strike, is entering a major new phase with NBC’s midseason scheduling of the Entertainment One-produced 22-episode drama The Firm, based on John Grisham’s novel and the Tom Cruise-starring movie. Back in 2007, two of the acquired series stockpiled by the U.S. networks as strike contingency, Flashpoint by CBS and Crusoe by NBC, aired in-season on Fridays and Saturdays, and Flashpoint even got a brief tun in the Thursday 10 PM slot when the broadcast nets ran out of originals at the height of the labor dispute. But since then, NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox have largely limited lower-license-fee drama series acquisitions to summer runs. (Fox’s attempt to extend the run of such a series, The Good Guys, into the regular season backfired.) Then in April, NBC picked up the 22-episode The Firm based on a spec script by Lucas Reiter. Two weeks later, at NBC’s upfront presentation, the network announced The Firm as a midseason replacement to air on Sundays. And today, the straight-to-series drama was upgraded to the Thursday 10PM slot, which for years had been considered NBC’s top drama slot, home of such iconic series as Hill Street Blues, LA Law and ER. The network muddied the waters in the past year or so by slotting reality shows/comedies … Read More 
Next week will be crucial for ABC’s new drama Pan Am. The network is expected to decide whether to pick up additional episodes from the 1960s airline soap/spy drama (ABC gave the Sony Pictures TV-produced show an order for 5 scripts last week), and Pan Am will have its highest-profile oversees debut on BBC2. So far, the period drama is off to a solid start internationally, performing stronger abroad than it has in the US. Pan Am, which has been sold in 107 countries by Sony Pictures TV International, has launched in 6. Ratings for 5 of them — Canada, Sweden, Ireland, Norway and Spain — have come in, and in all but one, Pan Am was the most watched new U.S. drama premiere this fall. (In Spain, it was second to Person Of Interest.) In Sweden, Pan Am ranked as the country’s No.1 foreign series premiere ever. In Norway, it was the second highest-rated debut for a foreign series behind Prison Break. Now if only Pan Am producers could slip Nielsen boxes to those Scandinavian families…
EXCLUSIVE: Director-producer Marc Buckland has sold two projects to NBC, comedy RIP and drama State Of Mind. Both hail from Universal Television where Buckland is under a two-year development deal. He most recently directed the pilot for NBC’s new drama Grimm, which got off to a strong start last Friday. In his pilot writing debut, Buckland will pen and direct the single-camera comedy RIP, about a reluctant angel. A “Kindness Guru” who happens to be an asshole dies and in order to get to heaven is forced to return to earth and help people with the help of his simple minded brother.’
In the first full development cycle since Carol Mendelsohn brought in Julie Weitz as president of her CBS TV Studios-based production company last year, Carol Mendelsohn Prods has sold a half-dozen projects to CBS, CW and FX, including cop drama Throwdown Gun to FX penned by LA Confidential author James Ellroy. Most of the company’s broadcast projects are based on books. The list includes three shows at CBS: FBI drama The Murder Room, based on the book by Michael Capuzzo and written by feature scribe George Nolfi (The Bourne Ultimatum); female cop drama Widow Detective, penned by 
David Hubbard (feature Noel); and another cop drama, Two Badges, based on the book by Mona Ruiz and Geoff Boucher and penned by Ted Humphrey (The Good Wife). At the CW, Carol Mendelsohn Prods is behind Unearthly, a supernatural drama based on the book by Cynthia Hand and written by Hellcats creator Kevin Murphy, and The Hollows, based on the book series by Kim Harrison and penned by Jordan Hawley (Smallville). Additionally, the company recently received a pilot order from TNT for Scent Of The Missing, an adaptation of Susannah Charleson’s novel written … Read More 
Up-and-coming feature writers Chris Shafer and Paul Vicknair, whose movie script A Many Splintered Thing was recently named one of the ten Nicholls Fellowship finalists, have sold a comedy project to CBS. Titled Girlfriend Season, it is an observational romantic comedy that follows six people, a young married couple and their friends. Shafer and Vicknair, repped by UTA and Brillstein, are writing, with Generate producing.
EXCLUSIVE: Fox has bought Pandemic, a medical thriller from Mystic Pizza writer Amy Holden Jones, 3 Arts Entertainment and 20th Century Fox TV. WME-repped Jones is writing the project, which follows an epidemiologist who is facing difficult adversaries as he fights to stop a catastrophic pandemic. She will executive produce with 3 Arts’ Oly Obst and partner Erwin Stoff, who has been leading a push in the drama area for the management/production company this season. Stoff is executive producing for 3 Arts two other hourlong projects, a cop drama with magical elements from Michael Green and 20th TV, which recently landed a put pilot commitment at ABC, and CIA drama Secret America at NBC from writer Peter Landesman, Imagine TV and 20th TV.
Meanwhile, ABC has bought Puzzle Master, from ABC Studios and studio-based Sander/Moses Prods. Written by Gwendolyn Parker (Without a Trace), the project centers on a quirky puzzle master who uses her unique acuity and distinctive way of perceiving the world to help the San Francisco Bay Area’
EXCLUSIVE: Millennium Entertainment is putting Woody Harrelson into the Best Actor Oscar race this year, closing a $2 million U.S. rights acquisition of Rampart. That is the Oren Moverman-directed police corruption drama that Moverman wrote with L.A. Confidential author James Ellroy. The plan is to open in 20 cities and launch campaigns for Harrelson and for Moverman for Best Director and Screenplay. A deal for Canadian rights is expected to close shortly. Millennium Entertainment CEO Bill Lee made the deal and Millennium Films’ Mark Gill will be a consultant on this and get to roll up his sleeves and wage an awards season campaign for Harrelson, who drew raves at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival for his portrayal as a corrupt cop in a drama that also stars Sigourney Weaver, Robin Wright, Ned Beatty, Ben Foster, Ice Cube, Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon. The 1990s Los Angeles police family drama explores the dark soul and misadventures of an LAPD cop whose past finally catches up with him in a department-wide corruption scandal. He is forced to answer to his family and the police department heads for his misdeeds. It’s Moverman’s second straight film with Harrelson, whom he directed in The Messenger. The film debuted September 10 at the Princess of Wales Theater in Toronto, and got a strong response. WME Global’s Alexis Garcia made the … Read More 
EXCLUSIVE: Dick Wolf’s Universal TV-based production company is having an active development season under new scripted development executive Danielle Gelber. Last month, NBC bought a firefighter drama from feature writers Michael Brandt and Derek Haas. Now I’ve learned that Wolf Films has set up 2 more hourlong projects at NBC — one from The L Word creator Ilene Chaiken and one from former Smallville executive producers Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer — that put a twist on two classic franchises, medical and cop drama. In addition to the writers, each show is executive produced by Wolf, Wolf Films president Peter 
Jankowski and Gelber. The untitled Ilene Chaiken project centers on a lesbian couple who are doctors at an inner-city Philadelphia hospital. The Slavkin/Swimmer project is a high-tech character-driven procedural about investigators who go into the memory banks of murder victims in order to solve the crimes. This is the second sale this development season for Chaiken, who spent the past 8 years at Showtime working on her drama The L Word and its reality offshoot. A character-driven procedural she is writing and executive producing with Joel Silver landed at CBS last week with a put pilot commitment. Swimmer and Slavkin spent 7 years on Smallville, rising to executive producers. … Read More 
After Scott Foley co-starred in Rina Mimoun’s CBS/Warner Bros. TV drama pilot The Doctor this past development season, the actor is teaming with Mimoun for another CBS/WBTV drama project, this time serving as a writer. CBS has bought The Escape Artist, a drama script from WBTV about a brother and sister who help people disappear. It will be co-written and executive produced by Foley and Privileged creator Mimoun, marking Foley’s writing debut.
EXCLUSIVE: Former Homicide executive producers Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson are back on the beat, this time at the CW. The network has bought Musketeers 3.0, a cop drama project which will be written by Fontana and executive produced by him and Levinson. It centers on three outstanding but out-of-control New York detectives who meet their match when a sexy, young rookie is assigned to their team. Levinson and Fontana’s banner The Levinson/Fontana Co. is producing with Warner Bros. TV. Rookie cops are popular on TV these days — ABC has Rookie Blue and CBS is launching The 2-2 in midseason.
This ABC show now in its 13th season is the bane of my existence (because I hate it so much) and returns on Monday, September 19th, with a fall season lineup of spandex-sporting contestants that’s as bewildering as ever. The full roster is:
Bruckheimer Television has made an early entrance into the TV marketpace, landing one of the first major commitments this year. The company is back at CBS, the network where it has had most success, with a new character-based procedural drama from writer Aron Eli Coleite (NBC’s Heroes), which has been given a put pilot commitment. The untitled drama centers on a common-sense mother who becomes a New York State Trooper. Bruckheimer TV and Warner Bros. TV are producing, with Coleite, Bruckheimer and Jonathan Littman executive producing and KristieAnne Reed co-executive producing. Bruckheimer TV is looking to rebound after not scoring a pilot order for the first time in years last season. So far, the broadcast networks’ big development commitments have gone to drama project from A-list producers: Bruckheimer, Dick Wolf (the Michael Brandt/Derek Haas firefighter drama at NBC) and Greg Berlanti (Marc Guggenheim’s legal drama at Fox). Bruckheimer TV currently has 5 series on the air, the 3 CSI dramas and The Amazing Race on CBS and the summer reality series Take the Money And Run on ABC.
Another soap veteran, The Young and the Restless regular Michael Graziadei has booked a recurring role on FX’s upcoming drama series American Horror Story. The thriller, from Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuck, is about a couple (Dylan McDermott, Connie Britton) moving into a 1920s house and their new nosy neighbor Constance (Jessica Lange). Graziadei, repped by Innovative and Main Title, will play Constance’s new, young boyfriend.
Ashton Holmes (HBO’s The Pacific) has landed a recurring role on the upcoming ABC drama Revenge, which stars Emily VanCamp as a young woman who goes to the Hamptons to exact revenge on the rich Grayson family who destroyed her father. Holmes, repped by UTA and manager … Read More 
This year’
EXCLUSIVE: Coming up on Starz — another action drama series from Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, executive producers of the pay cable network’s breakout hit Spartacus: Blood and Sand and its offshoot Spartacus: Gods of the Arena. I hear Starz has greenlighted to series Noir, a live-action adaptation of the 2001 Japanese anime series.