TNT Orders Series ‘Proof’ & ‘Public Morals’

Turner’s upfront next week will feature a familiar face. The Closer star Kyra Sedgwick is returning to TNT‘s lineup, this time as a producer. The cable network has picked up to series pilot Proof, a supernatural medical drama executive produced by Sedgwick in her TV series producing debut. Also ordered to series is the 1960s cop drama Public Morals, written, directed by and starring Ed Burns, which counts Steven Spielberg among its executive producers. Both projects, which had been clear frontrunners, have received 10-episode orders for 2015 debut. Of TNT’s other drama pilots, there is discussion about possibly retooling Agent X starring Sharon Stone, while Guilt By Association is not going forward.

Written by Rob Bragin, Proof stars Jennifer Beals as a skeptical, hard science, female surgeon who’s struggled with family issues including a tragic death. She is persuaded to investigate cases of reincarnation, out-of-body experiences, hauntings — all of it looking for verifiable proof, to try to answer one of life’s greatest questions: Is death truly the end, or is there something … beyond?. Matthew Modine and Joe Morton co-star. Bragin and Sedgwick executive produce with her manager Jill Littman and producer Tom Jacobson.

Public Morals is set in 1967 in New York City’s Public Morals Division, where cops walk the line between morality and criminality as the temptations that comes from dealing with all kinds of vice can get the better of them. It centers on cop Terry Muldoon (Burns), who knows the line between the good guys and bad guys is thin, and he is determined to raise his sons to be honest and hardworking as he deals with the dark underbelly of the vice world. Michael Rapaport and Elizabeth Masucci co-star. For Burns, the project is personal: His father Edward J. Burns worked for the NYPD during the late 1960s. This marks the first TV series multi-hyphenated Burns has created and is starring in. It also brings Amblin TV’s series count to six, including TNT’s Falling Skies and newly picked up Fox drama Red Band Society. Amblin TV and TNT Original Prods are producing Public Morals, with Spielberg and Burns executive producing alongside Darryl Frank, Justin Falvey and Aaron Lubin. Burns recently co-starred in another TNT period crime drama, Frank Darabont’s Mob City, which ran for one season.