Neve Campbell won’t be starring in a midseason crime drama on ABC after all: The network has ended development on Avalon, a David E. Kelley series that would have marked Campbell’s first post-Scream leading role.
In Avalon, created by Kelley and based on the Michael Connelly short story of the same name, Campbell would have played Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detective Nicole “Nic” Searcy, who’s based in the city of Avalon on Santa Catalina Island. “Catalina has a local population that serves more than 1 million tourists a year, and each day when the ferries arrive, hundreds of potential new stories enter the island,” ABC said in a logline for the show. “Detective Searcy is pulled into a career-defining mystery that will challenge everything she knows about herself and the island.”
According to Deadline, ABC passed on Avalon after seeing the first episode, even after handing the project a straight-to-series order in February. A+E Networks, which alongside 20th Television produced the Avalon pilot through its A+E Studios arm, will now shop the series to streamers and other networks.
A+E Networks did the same thing to find a new home for The Lincoln Lawyer, another David E. Kelley project based on a Michael Connelly story with Campbell on the cast roster. CBS passed on The Lincoln Lawyer, so A+E Networks set it up at Netflix instead.
The cast of Avalon also includes Demetrius Grosse (Fear the Walking Dead), Alexa Mansour (The Walking Dead: World Beyond), Steven Pasquale (The Bite), and Roslyn Ruff (Blue Bloods). Kelley wrote the first episode and serves as executive producer alongside Connelly, showrunner Dana Calvo, Rose Fineman of Fineman Entertainment and Barry Jossen and Tana Jamieson of A+E Studios.
