TNT’s
announcement on Monday that they were picking up NBC’s
Southland, wasn’t so much a surprise for the creative team behind the canceled cop drama, as a relief. “We’d been hearing whispers for the last couple of weeks,” says casting director John Frank Levey, adding, “It’s a great place for us to be. I think we’re going to be free to tell the story the way we wanted to.”
Levey thinks
Southland will have a long and exciting life on the network that hosts shows like
The Closer and
Dark Blue. TNT will air the first seven episodes that were shown on NBC as well as the six that have never aired as
Southland’s first complete season, starting January 2010. “Then, as they see how it goes, one hopes they’ll order a second season quickly,” he says. “We’ll probably know by February, maybe by Valentine’s Day, whether we’d be back in production by August. It would be fantastic.”
The casting director has no hard feelings when it comes to NBC’s decision, agreeing that it wasn’t the appropriate network for the gritty show. “I think on some level NBC was right,” he told us at the Casting Society of America’s 25th Annual Artios Awards. “Where they are today doesn’t have a place for what
Southland wanted to be. And if we were going to sort of rip the genitalia off the show to accommodate what they wanted it to be, we would have felt like crap. So I think it was a happy separation.”