According to The Hollywood Reporter, after being portrayed by Sarah Paulson in one of the year’s best television performances, Marcia Clark is now getting her own shot at a television show. NBC has given a put pilot commitment to a legal drama adapted from Clark’s novel Blood Defense. Clark will co-write the series alongside Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain, who have both written on Angel, The 100, and The Vampire Diaries. Blood Defense tells the story of Samantha Brinkman, a hard-working criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles whose life spirals out of control when she’s hired to defend a police detective in a major double homicide case, which throws her into the public eye and unfurls dark secrets about her past.
Clark herself was thrust into the public spotlight when she served as a prosecuting attorney in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. In 1998, Clark co-authored a book about the Simpson case with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Teresa Carpenter called Without A Doubt. Five years ago, she switched gears and got into the mystery business with her debut novel, Guilt By Association, which sparked three more novels—The Competition, Killer Ambition, and Guilt By Degrees—and two short stories about its central prosecutor Rachel Knight. Blood Defense, her most recent novel, moved away from Knight to focus on Brinkman, a defense attorney. Guilt By Association was developed as a drama by TNT with Julia Stiles cast in the leading role, but it never got picked up. Now, just a few months after Blood Defense’s release, she has another chance at television—and in The Good Wife’s absence, television could certainly use another killer legal show right now. Maybe now that they’re tequila drinking buddies, Clark can nab Paulson for the leading role.
Blood Defense will be executive produced by Clark, Craft, and Fain, alongside The Family and Wicked City executive producers David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman, and Laurie Zaks.