Epix to adapt Get Shorty for TV

US premium cable channel Epix is to produce a TV version of 1990s movie Get Shorty.

Production on the series will begin this year ahead of a 2017 launch, with MGM Television attached.

MGM is the US studio that originally adapted Elmore Leonard’s 1990 novel as a film and part-owns Epix with Paramount Pictures and its parent Viacom and Lionsgate Entertainment.

Davey Holmes (Shameless, In Treatment) will create and executive produce the ten-episode series.

The series follows a man who moves to Los Angeles to become a movie producer to escape his former life as muscle for a Nevada crime ring but finds it catching up with him.

Get Shorty will be the latest in a long line of feature films that have been remade as television dramas such as Lethal Weapon, which Warner Bros. Television in the US is debuting to buyers this week at the LA Screenings.

“I had the pleasure of working with Elmore Leonard early in my career and I am a big fan of his writing,” said Mark Greenberg, president and CEO of Davey Holmes is a tremendous talent and has created a fantastic new series that is in the spirit of Leonard’s unique brand of social satire and strong narrative voice.

MGM has already had significant success adapting Fargo for FX, with the series currently two seasons in, with a third coming.

The studio recently placed unscripted producer Mark Burnett in charge of the MGM Television and Digital Group, resulting in the exit of Roma Khanna, after buying out the shares in United Artists Media Group it didn’t already own.