Making A TV Show About The Miami Drug Trade Of The ’70s With Michael Bay Is Harder Than You’d Think

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Hearing the news that Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer have been developing a 1970s period series about the Miami drug trade isn’t surprising. In fact, it’s downright exciting. Everything about the sentence just gets one pumped for the show’s potential. So, given that, you have to wonder why it’s been so hard for one of Hollywood’s most powerful producing teams to get the show off the ground.

From Deadline:

The road to the screen for Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay‘s drug-trade drama is taking a new turn. I have learned that the project, which was picked up to pilot by TNT last fall, will be redeveloped by the cable network. While the current pilot is not going forward, I hear TNT brass liked the setting — the wild and unpredictable world of the Florida drug trade in the 1970s — and want to take another stab at it. Michelle Ashford, who wrote the pilot script before her Masters of Sex was picked up by Showtime, is busy as showrunner of the pay cable drama but is expected to be involved in the retooling of the TNT project.

Originally, the plan was to develop the series at HBO as an adaptation of the documentary Cocaine Cowboys. Eventually the show moved to TNT and was suddenly gaining momentum after years of being stuck in development hell… until today that is.

Currently, TNT is all about being in the Michael Bay business as the man’s other series, The Last Ship, performed fairly well for its freshman season last summer. It’s surprising it’s taking this long to get the show on the air, and while it’s easy to say that the project might just be a turd, it’s also possible that the creative team is struggling to decide how graphic they can get with their content on TNT versus what they could have gotten away with at HBO. If that is the case, hopefully it gets resolved sooner rather than later.

Source: Deadline

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