'Philly' is out, but city to get TV's 'Hack'

New show to be filmed here, star Phila. actor

by ELLEN GRAY

elgray@phillynews.com

Television giveth, and television taketh away.

On the day that ABC officially announced the cancellation of Philly, its legal drama starring Roxborough's Kim Delaney, both Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter reported yesterday that CBS had picked up Hack, a show starring Philadelphia-based actor David Morse that will be shot here in the City of Brotherly Love.

Though the official announcement won't be made until today, when CBS executives meet with advertisers in New York's Carnegie Hall, the Greater Philadelphia Film Office's Web site was already treating it as a done deal last night.

Having a TV drama filmed in and around the city, rather than in Los Angeles or New York, would be a huge coup for the film office, which came closest in the mid-1990s when the pilot for a show about firefighters called Philly Heat was shot here but never became a series. In the years that NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street filmed in Baltimore, the show pumped an estimated half-million dollars a week into the local economy.

One of Morse's co-stars would be former Homicide star Andre Braugher.

Screenwriter David Koepp (Spider-Man, Panic Room) wrote the pilot, filmed here last month. It reportedly introduces Morse as a disgraced cop who tries to continue fighting crime while driving a cab and working to win back the trust of his wife and son.

On Monday, NBC also put a Philly-linked drama, American Dreams, on its fall schedule. Set in the 1960s, it focuses on the family of a girl who becomes a dancer on American Bandstand.

BEFORE WE GET all excited about the latest "good news" dangled to us from network TV-land - that the new series called "Hack" will be based and filmed in Philadelphia - let's do a reality check.

Frankly, we're not convinced this show has legs. And the city could use one, since the presence of a long-running TV show can pump prestige and big dough into the local economy of the city where it's based. Look what "Cheers" did for Boston. And what "Laverne & Shirley" did for Milwaukee.

Well, OK, maybe let's not look there.

CBS' Hack, the first network drama ever to be filmed in Philadelphia, hasn't even hit the airwaves and someone's already making fun of the name.

Asked last week about TV's current crime-fighting wave, Law & Order producer Dick Wolf didn't mince words.

"Television eats its young," he said. "Whenever anything is successful, it's send in the clones...and the clones never work."