TV continues to be a big draw for actors and other talented types, some of whom – like Pierce Brosnan from yesterday – are coming back to the goggle box, and some, like Gus Van Sant, that have rarely dabbled in it, who are taking the plunge. For his part, Van Sant has agreed to direct the pilot for a new political drama called Boss, which will star Kelsey Grammer.
Van Sant’s previous TV experience is largely limited to directing one short and playing himself on Entourage. Boss should prove to be something very different, though it is being backed by a US cable channel instead of the network territory that Grammer is more used to. For his part, the actor's work has usually been in comedy, so it'll be interesting to see him tackle a darker drama.
Starz (which has produced a series based on Crash plus Spartacus: Blood & Sand) has scooped up a script spearheaded by Grammer and Apocalypto co-writer Farhad Safinia and decided to take it straight to series with an eight-episode order. The King Lear-inspired plot will revolve around Grammer as the mayor of Chicago, who discovers that he has a degenerative medical condition. Instead of letting the rest of the world know, he tries to keep it between himself and his doctor.
The move to cable is less surprising than if Van Sant had, say, decided to direct an episode of Desperate Housewives – the likes of HBO, Starz and Showtime often tend to be a lot more creatively free than the demands of the networks.
There’s no word on when the show will actually air, but we’d guess it’d arrive either later next year or early 2012.