Replace John Travolta and Gene Hackman with Chris O'Dowd and Ray Romano, and you've now got yourself the starring cast for Epix's series adaptation of GET SHORTY.
Announced earlier this summer, the series would position O'Dowd as Miles Daly, the muscle for organized crime who wants to get out of the life for the sake of his daughter and produce feature films as a way to launder money. But, of course, one can never really leave the life behind, and his life choices follow him to Hollywood as he teams up with Romano as Rick, a has-been producer who now just makes schlock.
GET SHORTY is headed straight to series on a 10-episode order and is expected to premiere sometime next summer.
We'll see if this works out, but I feel a lot better knowing that it'll be O'Dowd in the Chili Palmer-type role Travolta brought to the big screen in adapting Elmore Leonard's novel. For a brief second, I feared someone had Romano pegged for that part, and not the other way around. Whew… We really dodged a bullet there.