Setting up a possible showdown against Philip Seymour Hoffman and Liev Schreiber over the annual, obligatory Emmy win for indie-film actors who deigned to come to TV, Paul Giamatti has signed on to star in FX’s new pilot Hoke, the network announced today. The one-hour drama finds Get Shorty, Out Of Sight, and Karen Sisco writer Scott Frank moving from Elmore Leonard to the work of another respected crime-fiction author, Charles Willeford, whose series of Hoke Mosely novels form the basis of the show. (One of them, Miami Blues, has already been made into a movie, with Fred Ward playing Hoke.) Like the books, the show will take place in 1980s Miami and have a darkly comic tone, with Giamatti playing Hoke as “hardboiled and possibly insane”—which means Giamatti will probably get to do that whole spluttering rage thing he does so well, after bottling it all in for Downton Abbey. And this time, he gets a gun.
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