WALKING DEAD Cast Members Join Darabont’s L.A. NOIR

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Series taking shape as pilot moves toward shooting

There isn’t any reason for anybody around here to attempt shielding their excitment about Frank Darabont’s upcoming series, L.A. Noir.  For true blue crime geeks, the series is basically promising the moon–a Darabont-led hardboiled series that takes place on the same fertile urban playground upon which Chandler and Ellroy invented and reinvented the genre over the past century.

Darabont’s transition and subsequent ascent into the upper echelons of cable royalty on the wings of The Walking Dead have virtually guaranteed him an audience, as well as creative contol over any project in which he chooses to take part.  It’s also guaranteed him our complete attention.

Darabont will direct the pilot episode and serve as showrunner for the series, which will star Walking Dead‘s Jon Bernthal in the lead role.  Today it was reported that Bernthal will be joined on set by two familiar faces.  According to the Hollywood Reporter, Walking Dead alums Andrew Rothenberg (Jim, season one) and Jeffrey DeMunn (Dale, seasons one and two) have been confirmed to the cast.

DeMunn will play Hal Morrison, the detective at the head of the LAPD’s mob squad.  Rothenberg will guest star as fellow detective Eddy Sanderson.

For the purposes of promotion, L.A. Noir can be synopsized as a chronicle of the decades-long battle between the Los Angeles mob and the L.A.P.D.  It is based on John Buntin’s nonfiction work, L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City.  For the purposes of this post, it can be synopsized as an extra Christmas morning around which all other engagements will need to be rescheduled.

Or I suppose we can TiVo it.

You can bet your bottom dollar that each and every tick on the L.A. Noir seismograph will be promptly reported and disseminated here at the Complex, as we wait with bated breath to see what Darabont cooks up next.