Lion's on the hunt for meaty TV

October 14, 2008 MGM is shifting gears in the TV biz, greenlighting a number of fictional series in hopes of jump-starting mainstream small-screen production and feeding its distribution pipeline with fresh content. In the next few weeks, the team at the Lion led by Jim Packer and Gary Marenzi will be talking up adaptations of two projects based on MGM-owned catalog titles: the Robert De Niro crime thriller "Ronin," which will be reconfigured as a series and probably shot in Europe, and the Meryl Streep/Jeremy Irons romancer "The French Lieutenant's Woman," which will be expanded into a miniseries. In addition, the Lion's TV team is in discussions with the Los Angeles-based indie production outfit Level One -- the company behind Paramount's 2009 "Star Trek" film -- and its creative head Gerard Boccaccio about developing several series.

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