USA is pulling the plug on Stanistan, a series the cable network had in development where Dexter’s Jennifer Carpenter would play a press officer at a State Department outpost in a very clearly fictional country. The cast was promising, as Carpenter would have been joined by Zach Gilford (Friday Night Lights) and Jonathan Cake (Desperate Housewives), while the show promised “a delicate balance of danger and levity.”
Nevertheless, the network passed—possibly upon realizing the writers couldn’t come up with a better name for their fictional nation than Stanistan, which suggests a zany comedy in which a guy named Stan becomes ruler of his own country. (Perhaps the State Department is interested in Stanistan’s vast reserves of Unobtanium.)
USA has elsewhere committed to two other pilots—Carlton Cuse’s Colony and the excellently named Mr. Robot—while two other dramas, Queen Of The South, and Evil Men, are still possibilities.