It’s been five months since Raylan Givens rode off into the proverbial sunset and Justified ended its six season run on FX. It’s surely a show that is missed by many, but the cast of the Elmore Leonard-inspired series hasn’t disappeared into obscurity quite yet. Timothy Olyphant will be a guest star on The Grinder, Fox’s new Rob Lowe-starring series, and Walton Goggins will appear in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. There may be some time before that new Elmore Leonard project at AMC sees the light of day, but by the looks of things, the show’s other producers are cooking up something new over at TNT.
According to Variety, the network has just given a pilot order to a program called Robbers, a drama based on Christopher Cook’s novel of the same name. The project comes from executive producers Michael Dinner and Sarah Timberman, and “focuses on a crime spree across Texas. With twists and turns of interwoven storylines of both the guilty and innocent, the story will follow “two ex-con ‘running buddies,’ a girl who complicates matters, and the cop who is after all of them.”
Cook will act as executive producer and will be writing the series with Dinner, who is also signed on to the project to direct. No cast has yet been announced but, at one point, Tim McGraw was set to executive produce and star in the pilot, which would have been his first recurring role on the small-screen, but the musician and actor has since dropped out of the project.
This pilot order is the latest move by TNT in their ongoing effort to rebrand. After announcing their new catchphrase (?) “Boom” in 2014, the network is making a valiant effort in moving away from its signature “female-centric” procedurals for a grittier programming slant. Included in the network’s pilot pipeline are thrillers from both Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer, because hey, why not?