CBS on Thursday handed series orders to a trio of dramas, including a firefighter procedural starring SEAL Team‘s Max Thieriot.
Other projects scoring a coveted green light at the Eye Network: Cop drama East New York and legal yarn So Help Me Todd.
The pickups come just hours after CBS cancelled five of its current series, including Magnum P.I., The United States of AI, B Positive, Good Sam and How We Roll.
Fire Country, FKA as Cal Fire, stars Thieriot as Bode Donovan, a young convict who joins a firefighting program for inmates in a bid to shorten his prison sentence. The program brings him back to his hometown in Northern California, “where he and other inmates work alongside elite firefighters to extinguish massive blazes across the region,” per the official description.
Thieriot — who will juggle SEAL Team with his new Fire duties — co-wrote the story along with Tony Phelan and Joan Rater (Grey’s Anatomy, Madam Secretary), based on his experiences growing up in Northern California fire country.
The series hails from Jerry Bruckheimer, and co-stars Billy Burke, Kevin Alejandro and Diane Farr.
East New York — co-written by William Finkelstein (The Good Fight) and Mike Flynn (Big Sky) — follows Regina Haywood (played by Dickinson‘s Amanda Warren), “the newly promoted police captain of East New York, an impoverished, working class neighborhood at the eastern edge of Brooklyn,” per the official synopsis. “She leads a diverse group of officers and detectives, some of whom are reluctant to deploy her creative methods of serving and protecting during the midst of social upheaval and the early seeds of gentrification.”
The cast also includes Jimmy Smits, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Richard Kind and Kevin Rankin.
Lastly, So Help Me Todd — which weathered a behind-the-scenes crisis this winter when Geena Davis dropped out mid-production, to be replaced by Marcia Gay Harden — centers on a talented but directionless P.I. (Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist’s Skylar Astin) who begrudgingly agrees to work as the in-house investigator for his overbearing mother Joan (Harden), a successful attorney reeling from the recent dissolution of her marriage.
Scott Prendergast (Wilfred) penned the script and will serve as an EP alongside Liz Kruger and Craig Shapiro.
