Alan Ball has created a few well-known TV projects during his years in the business, and he's about to put together another project with HBO. While the new drama currently has no title, we do know a few big things about the potential series. First and foremost, Holly Hunter will star in the project if it moves forward to series. It's also moving straight-to-series, so expect it on the air sometime in the future.
The new project will be a family drama with a multi-racial component. In the story, Holly Hunter will play Audrey Black, a married mother who adopted a slew of kids of different nationalities with her husband Greg Bishop sometime in the past. It's sort of like The Family Nobody Wanted, but with an Alan Ball bent. Per THR, Audrey Black will be a psychologist who will be working for a corporation when the series picks up, although we will soon learn that she used to have more of a free-spirited therapy job.
By the time the series starts Audrey's kids---who originally hailed from Vietnam, Somali and Colombia--will be growing up and moving out of the house. Her husband will be battling depression. (An actor has yet to be cast for that role.) Holly Hunter's character will find herself in a transition period without knowing what direction to go in. Reports have also mentioned one of the kids will start seeing things, which adds a whole additional layer to this family-oriented plot.
Ball is a big fan of writing characters who are working through things. He's probably most famous for creating True Blood, a series about vampires trying to figure out their place in the world order as they make themselves known to humans. That show had plenty of characters in transitions, but for different reasons. Six Feet Under also featured a lot of characters who were trying to figure it all out, and succeeded, to varying degrees. This family-oriented drama sounds a lot closer to Six Feet Under in a lot of ways than Alan Ball's last two creations: Banshee on Cinemax and the aforementioned True Blood on HBO, but we'll have to wait and see.
Of course, it's still untitled, and most of the cast hasn't been cemented, so even with the blessing that is a straight-to-series order, there's still a long way to go before the new show will hit the schedule, and HBO is notorious for taking its time with new programs. It should be particularly exciting to see Holly Hunter back on TV, as we haven't caught the actress too much on TV since Saving Grace ended its run back in 2010. (She did appear in Top of the Lake and Bonnie and Clyde.) We'll let you know when the show does eventually get off the ground. In the meantime, you can check out what HBO has coming up with our midseason TV premiere schedule.
