ABC has announced that Take Two, an upbeat procedural starring Rachel Bilson (Hart of Dixie) and Eddie Cibrian (The Playboy Club), has been ordered straight to series.
“Andrew and Terri are wonderful storytellers and this is the perfect project for their return to ABC,” said Channing Dungey, President, ABC Entertainment. “We’re excited to see Rachel and Eddie bring these characters to life.”
From Andrew Marlowe and Terri Edda Miller (Castle), Take Two tells the story of Ella (Bilson), the former star of a cop series who’s fresh out of rehab after hitting her rock bottom. Desperate to restart her career and move into a new phase of her life, she finds herself shadowing a lonewolf private investigator Eddie (Cibrian) as research for her next role. Though initially annoyed with having to hand hold Ella through this whole process, Eddie soon finds that the TV star’s fame comes in handy when his phone suddenly starts ringing off the hook with new clients.
Take Two is the first series for Marlowe and Miller after they left Castle and is the second straight-to-series order ABC has given recently, following fellow procedural The Rookie. That series follows Castle star Nathan Fillion as he plays a man fulfilling a lifelong dream of becoming a cop and dealing with being the oldest rookie on the force.
ABC has been touting its plans of becoming more procedural for a while now, so going after shows in the vein of its most successful procedural of the decade isn’t much of a shock. What is a touch surprising is that they’ve had to go outside their already length development class in order to find these shows, meaning that either they’re dissatisfied with the majority of the scripts they’ve been purchasing or they might be ready to clean house of the bubble dramas they carried into this season.
