Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul was voted TV star of the year by Pollstar and O’Connor recalled the joy of scoring an instant classic on Tuesday’s studio. “It was an exultant cry,” said the man who played “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” beat cop Frankie Hodges. “But being on the TV landscape playing Frankie Hodges, getting to act out the celebration of a guy finding freedom … I always chuckle, I laugh, my face is so red and it’s just the best time ever.”
HBO bought the rights to Martha Rodgers’ acclaimed memoir Flying Lessons: Lost And Found in Flight. The network ordered a pilot about an 11-year-old Irish immigrant from Brooklyn who comes to New York to work as a flight attendant, where she meets several of her fellow employees and finds herself far from her home.
“I get goosebumps thinking about it,” Rodgers said in a phone interview with Guardian Music. “I’m really thrilled that it’s finally starting to happen with it moving forward to pilot episode. I hope we start filming as soon as possible.”
Martha Rodgers in 1981 Photograph: Betsy Moss
Elsewhere, the bestselling series Wakeboarding and the Taking to the Beach will join with Generation Cry for Girl in an O’Connor-produced mini-series. NatGeo has given the green light to new remakes of Star Trek and Vampire Chronicles. Fox is adapting Thief and Empire of Thieves, and Fox has greenlit an updated version of the original Thief novel by John LeCarre. Meanwhile, Paramount Television has placed The Rookie, a procedural with John Leguizamo in the lead role, under its ownership of Dick Wolf’s TV empire.
Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, a fixture of MTV and MTV2, is returning to television with a Netflix show about channel shopping.
Minnie Driver has brought new life to Once, a critically acclaimed play featuring plays by Pinter, Henrik Ibsen and Eugene O’Neill. Driver will play a “monotone, elegant” working woman in the 1970s Chicago in the original production.