Thirty years ago, Deadwood creator David Milch began his TV writing career working under Steven Bochco on Hill Street Blues, a landmark series that kicked off a revolution in quality TV and began NBC’s transformation from also-ran to powerhouse. Now, with the Peacock stuck in an even more profound slump, the network is once again turning to Milch and Bochco. A rep for 20th Century Fox TV confirms that the duo have sold an untitled one-hour legal drama to NBC about “an extraordinarily talented and successful lawyer†named Ted Tapman, who’s “driven and bound by a dark secret. Set inside D.C.’s hottest law firm, which boasts a perfect record of billion-dollar settlements, this is a series about how we negotiate with our demons and the price we pay for those alliances.â€
Bochco and Milch, who went on to work together again on ABC’s smash hit NYPD Blue, were brought together by producer Brian Grazer of 20th-based Imagine Television. After hearing the pitch for the project, new NBC chief Bob Greenblatt jumped on the idea, ordering a script with a mid-six-figure penalty attached if for some reason the network doesn’t decide to produce a pilot. Milch had to get special permission from HBO to work on the NBC project, since he’s already got a day job: running HBO’s upcoming Dustin Hoffman drama Luck. Meanwhile, Thursday was a big day for fans of nineties superstar producers: Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, best known for thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, sold a soap opera-ish drama to Fox based on the book Confessions of a Contractor. Tom Spezialy (Desperate Housewives) is writing.