Well, hey, it’s a track record thing. LONE STAR and AWAKE are the dood’s big credits. LONE STAR was cancelled after two episodes, and AWAKE bought it after, what, half a season? So of course Kyle gets into the game again. Because intelligence is a much rarer commodity, isn’t it, than your teachers ever led you to believe? Anyway:
Kyle Killen Drama Lands at NBC as Put Pilot – by Nellie Andreeva (Deadline.Com)
EXCLUSIVE: Influence, a drama project from Lone Star and Awakecreator Kyle Killen, has received a put pilot commitment by ABC in a competitive situation involving multiple networks. The project, from 20th Century Fox TV where Killen is under a deal, is described as a provocative workplace ensemble centered on the complicated relationship between two brothers — a bipolar genius in human psychology and a slick ex-con — who head a unique agency designed to solve their clients’ problems using the real science of human motivation and manipulation. In addition to helping their clients, the agency’s staff sometime turn their powers to pull strings on one another. Killen is the writer/executive producer. Influence marks a departure from Killen’s previous two series projects, Fox’s Lone Star and NBC’s Awake, which both had very complex, non-linear narratives as they centered on protagonists living dual lives. Still, Killen kept a duality element in his new show too, making one of the main characters bipolar. On the feature side, Killen wrote the Black List script The Beaver, which was directed by Jodie Foster.
Must be the “departure from Killen’s previous two series projects” thing that got this deal made, right? Oh, and for those of you who don’t know what a “put pilot” is, it’s one where the network guarantees to “put up” the money to shoot a pilot. Of course, they don’t always do that even though they said they would, but it looks good on the deal memo and, well, remember what we said about intelligence above. (We need a really good smilie to put in here. Anybody got one we can use?)