Earlier this year, TNT ordered a pilot for the period drama L.A. Noir, based on the 2009 book of the same title by John Buntin. Today we're learning the cable network has given a six-episode order for the series. Frank Darabont (The Walking Dead, The Shawshank Redemption), who directed his own adapted screenplay for the pilot, will executive produce.
"This series is an intense, exciting drama that takes viewers back to a truly fascinating time in the history of Los Angeles," said Michael Wright, head of programming for TNT. "Frank Darabont, [producers] Michael De Luca and Elliott Webb have delivered an outstanding opening episode that evokes the time and place in stunning detail."
The pilot has a large cast, and the series is expected to be an ensemble-style drama with intersecting storylines.
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L.A. Noir
John Buntin
Other cities have histories. Los Angeles has legends.
Midcentury Los Angeles. A city sold to the world as "the white spot of America," a land of sunshine and orange groves, wholesome Midwestern values and Hollywood stars, protected by the world's most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure girls" and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men — one L.A.'s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief — each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city.
Former street thug turned featherweight boxer Mickey Cohen left the ring for the rackets, first as mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel's enforcer, then as his protégé. A fastidious dresser and unrepentant killer, the diminutive Cohen was Hollywood's favorite gangster — and L.A.'s preeminent underworld boss. Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, and Sammy Davis Jr. palled around with him; TV journalist Mike Wallace wanted his stories; evangelist Billy Graham sought his soul.
William H. Parker was the proud son of a pioneering law-enforcement family from the fabled frontier town of Deadwood. As a rookie patrolman in the Roaring Twenties, he discovered that L.A. was ruled by a shadowy "Combination" — a triumvirate of tycoons, politicians, and underworld figures where alliances were shifting, loyalties uncertain, and politics were practiced with shotguns and dynamite. Parker's life mission became to topple it — and to create a police force that would never answer to elected officials again.
These two men, one morally unflinching, the other unflinchingly immoral, would soon come head-to-head in a struggle to control the city …
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