Pilot Season: First Look at Fox’s 2010 drama pilots

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Editor’s note: Show Tracker is covering the pilots under contention for the fall season at the five broadcast networks in the following order: ABC, CBS, CW, Fox and NBC. (Yes, it’s alphabetical.)
Fox has ordered only four drama pilots, and I’m going to start with ‘Breakout Kings’ in the hope that all of the frustrated ‘Prison Break’ fans who continue to flood my in-box nine months after the show went off the air will be appeased.

Matt Olmstead and Nick Santora, both of ‘Prison Break,’ have penned another clock-ticking adventure in which a team of U.S. Marshals and a group of convicts on work furlough are paired to apprehend recently escaped prisoners. So far, the cast includes: Laz Alonso (‘Dirty Sexy Money’), Domenick Lombardozzi (‘Graham’) and Jimmi Simpson (best known as Lyle the intern on ‘Late Show With David Letterman’). It will be produced by Chernin Entertainment, the new company formed by Peter Chernin, the former NewsCorp executive, and Katherine Pope, the former head of Universal Media Studios. Think of it as ‘White Collar’ meets ‘Prison Break’ meets ’24.’

Chernin Entertainment is producing another pilot, ‘Pleading Guilty,’ based on the book of the same title by Scott Turow. The legal thriller about embezzlement, bookmaking, offshore banking and the politics of a high-powered law firm was written by Jason Tracey of ‘Burn Notice’ and will be directed by Jon Avnet (‘The Starter Wife’).

‘The Shield’ creator Shawn Ryan has written ‘Ride-Along,’ about a rogue cowboy cop and Chicago’s first female police chief who vow to clean up the streets and take on the city’s dirty political machine. Todd Williams, pictured,(‘In Plain Sight’) has been cast. Ryan is writing what he knows. He grew up in Rockford, Ill., and went on many police ride-alongs when he was writing the pilot for ‘The Shield,’ and we know how that FX series worked out for him, so this has promise written all over it.

‘Midland,’ written by newcomer Kyle Killen, is a ‘subversive’ soap, following a con man who is juggling two wives and two lives set in the backdrop of greed and corruption in the Texas oil and power industries. Jimmy Wolk (‘Hallmark Hall of Fame’) has been cast.

--Maria Elena Fernandez (follow me on Twitter @writerchica)

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