WE tv crosses Divide into scripted

AMC Networks’ female-skewed channel WE tv has become the latest to move into scripted programming with The Divide, a 10-part “exploration of personal morality”.

Cable channels such as Discovery, History, OWN and BET have got in on the scripted act in the last few years and WE tv is now the latest to follow the trend.

The Divide, set for 2014, “probes how truth coexists in the modern justice system alongside ambition, ethics, politics and race”, following a female case worker fighting to save a death row inmate that she believes was wrongly convicted on murder a decade prior. Marin Ireland and Damon Gupton star.

AMC’s in-house production unit AMC Studios (The Walking Dead, Mad Men, Rectify) will produce the 10x60mins series, which Richard LaGravenese (Behind the Candelabra) has written.

LaGravenese and Tony Goldwyn will executive produce along with Andrew Sugerman and John Tinker, who will also be showrunner.

“Originally developed and piloted at AMC, The Divide gives WE tv the opportunity to enter the scripted space with a truly engaging series. It will join other series such as The Walking Dead, Low Winter Sun, Mad Men and Rectify that AMC Networks has developed or produced in our commitment to telling distinctive stories and bringing viewers quality, cinematic entertainment,” said AMC Networks’ COO Ed Carroll.

WE tv is also developing a trio of further scripted projects, namely All American Woman (WT), a series from Chris and Paul Weitz (About a Boy) and Depth Of Field Productions about the lives of three women living in different decades in the US; Dirty, a series from Fox Television Studios about a formerly successful female financier and her ex-housekeeper, who team up for an “unexpected and clever enterprise”; and Headhunters, which comes from Tom Fontana (Homicide: Life on the Street, Oz) and follows women’s “attempts to confront the ambiguity and conflicting choices that surround their lives today”.