Australian crime thriller Animal Kingdom being developed as a not-Australian series for Showtime

By Sean O'Neal | December 16, 2011 | 10:04pm

Aux Features Film

If there’s been one constant of this year’s TV development season—besides the fact that suddenly everyone needed a Western or a wizard or a wizard Western™—it’s been the idea of taking the movies that have begun to languish in TV’s shadow, cutting them up, and repackaging them as TV series. In the last year alone, we’ve seen TV versions pitched of the following [HUGE, PHLEGM-CLEARING COUGH]: Goodfellas, The Transporter, The Lincoln Lawyer, The Nanny Diaries, Source Code, Zombieland, Universal Soldier, Romancing The Stone, Scanners, The Adjustment Bureau, The Blues Brothers, The Boondock Saints, The Kids Are All Right, and Anger Management, at least some of which are actually in the works or, in the case of The Firm, already scheduled to debut. The latest, but certainly not the last: A Showtime adaptation of the Australian crime thriller Animal Kingdom, about a family of criminals and how your grandmother could have you killed if she wanted to.

Deadline reports that a drama series is currently in the works at the cable channel that will be executive produced by John Wells, the TV veteran whose credits include ER and The West Wing, and who’s already established himself at Showtime with Shameless, another show about a family lorded over by an awful person. Wells has partnered once again with his fellow Southland producer Jonathan Lisco (creator of Fox’s short-lived, post-Katrina cops drama K-Ville), who will handle the script—notably, completely autonomously from the creators of the original film—about a crooked, presumably now-American clan as they battle police and each other. And while Animal Kingdom, the movie, came to a rather abrupt end, this is Showtime, so they’ll probably learn to love each other for at least six seasons or so.