Fox’s procedural pilot “A.P.B.” will undergo some changes behind the scenes, with “Burn Notice” creator Matt Nix joining the show as an executive producer to overhaul the script, as the pilot’s creator and original writer David Slack has left the project due to creative differences.
Sources say that Nix will be co-running the pilot with director and executive producer Len Wiseman, with a new showrunner to be named at a later date if the show is picked up to series. Production on the pilot has been temporarily halted until next week, and given the heavy re-writing, reshoots will likely be required. The project has been shooting in Chicago.
“A.P.B.” centers around a tech billionaire (Justin Kirk) who purchases a troubled police precinct in the wake of a loved one’s murder. The series will explore whether the eccentric and enigmatic man’s cutting-edge approach can fix the broken ways of the blue-blooded veterans on the force.
Insiders close to the “A.P.B.” say that Slack’s exit was a mutual and amicable decision between him and Fox that came after network expressed a different creative vision from the original script Slack had sold. Nix was brought in to change the direction of the potential series, resulting in a drastically altered and more procedural version of the original story, which aimed to reflect real life headlines regarding police shootings in Ferguson and such. With Slack, who was very passionate about the serious subject matter, not in alignment with the new direction of the potential series, the writer/producer (who’s a co-exec producer on CBS’s “Person of Interest”) was released from his contract earlier this week.
Nix was a seamless addition to the project as he is currently under an overall deal at 20th Century Fox TV, which is the studio behind the pilot. In addition to Nix and Wiseman, Dennis Kim and Todd Hoffman serve as executive producers on the pilot, which was ordered in January. Eric Winter, Natalie Martinez and Ernie Hudson co-star alongside Kirk.
