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Clyde Phillips Inks New Deal With Lionsgate TV, Talks About Rebooting ‘Nurse Jackie’

By NELLIE ANDREEVA | Tuesday August 7, 2012 @ 4:33pm PDTTags: Big Deals TV, Clyde Phillips, Lionsgate TV
Nellie Andreeva

EXCLUSIVE: Clyde Phillips has signed a new two-year overall deal with Lionsgate Television. Phillips recently joined Lionsgate’s dark comedy Nurse Jackie, and his duties as executive producer/showrunner on the Showtime series will fall under his new pact with Lionsgate, which also covers development.

Phillips was already talking to Lionsgate about renewing his overall deal when the opportunity to take over Nurse Jackie came up when original showrunners Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius stepped down. “All the stars aligned,” Phillips said. “I thought Nurse Jackie was really good, and I thought it could be great.” He also liked the prospect of working with Nurse Jackie star Edie Falco and the fact that he was not asked to just come in and “babysit” an established series. “I was asked to reboot the show, and that’s a challenge I willingly and happily accept.”

Related: Showtime Renews ‘Nurse Jackie’ For Fifth Season With Clyde Phillips As Showrunner

To do that, Phillips has assembled a team of writers, including bringing in longtime friend, comedy veteran Tom Straw, as an executive producer. The two first worked together on Phillips’ Fox comedy series Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, on which Straw served as co-executive producer. Straw’s credits include Grace Under Fire, Cosby, Whoopi and most recently, The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson. Phillips’ team also includes Michael Davidoff & Bill Rosenthal (Men At Work) as co-executive producers; Cindy Caponera (Saturday Night Live), current Nurse Jackie scribe and playwright Liz Flahive as supervising producers; Daniele Nathanson (CSI: NY) as executive story editor; Gina Gold & Aurorae Khoo (Running Wilde) as story editors; and Abe Sylvia (Dirty Girl) as staff writer. Despite the fact that Nurse Jackie was given a fifth-season order with Phillips at the helm at the tail-end of the traditional staffing season when many sought-after writers are already locked in, “we got everybody we wanted from the highest echelon to staff writers,” Phillips said. He has spent the past month in the writers room and is getting ready to pitch their ideas for next season. Because he hasn’t discussed them with the network yet, Phillips was hesitant to reveal much about Nurse Jackie‘s fifth season, but said that it will focus on “the aspect of the newly sober Nurse Jackie character facing the consequences of what she has done to herself and others.” I hear that, in addition to the writer additions, the show’s cast will also likely undergo some tweaking.

“Clyde Phillips is an amazing showrunner, creator, and friend,” Lionsgate TV’s Kevin Beggs said. “Equally versed in comedy and drama, we have been exceedingly pleased with his development over the last two years, are thrilled that he has come aboard Nurse Jackie, and look forward to a long association together as we begin our next development deal.t” While The opportunity to work on Nurse Jackie was great, Phillips said he wanted to re-sign with Lionsgate TV, where the former Dexter showrunner had been since 2010, even before that came along. “It’s a writers and producers dream there,” he said. “They have innovative ways not only to put shows on but also keep them on the air.”

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Showtime Renews ‘Nurse Jackie’ For Fifth Season With Clyde Phillips As Showrunner

By NELLIE ANDREEVA | Thursday May 31, 2012 @ 5:45am PDTTags: Big Deals TV, Clyde Phillips, Nurse Jackie, Showtime
Nellie Andreeva

Nurse Jackie RenewedEXCLUSIVE: Former Dexter executive producer/showrunner Clyde Phillips is returning to Showtime as showrunner of the network’s half-hour series Nurse Jackie. With him on board, the dark comedy starring Edie Falco has been renewed for a fifth season. On Nurse Jackie, Phillips succeeds co-creators Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius, who recently left after serving as co-showrunners for the first four seasons. Coincidentally, what was a major reason for Los Angeles-based Wallem and Brixius to depart Nurse Jackie — the fact that it films in New York — was key to getting Phillips on board. Like Wallem and Brixius, Phillips too left Dexter after four years of a cross-country commute between Connecticut, where he lives with his family, and Los Angeles, where the Showtime drama is shot. To be close to his family, he made working on East Coast-based shows a condition in his 2010 overall deal with Lionsgate TV, which co-produces Nurse Jackie with Showtime. Phillips will serve as an executive producer on Nurse Jackie alongside Falco, Richie Jackson and Caryn Mandabach. Production on Season 5 will begin in late 2012. Read More »

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HBO Nabs Clyde Phillips Crime Drama

By NELLIE ANDREEVA | Tuesday October 26, 2010 @ 9:44am PDTTags: Cable TV, Clyde Phillips, HBO, HBO Development, Israeli Format TV Series, Israeli Formats, Lionsgate TV, TV, TV Deals
Nellie Andreeva

EXCLUSIVE: Clyde Phillips has set up his first post-Dexter project. After a bidding war among several cable networks, HBO has landed a character-driven drama from Phillips and Lionsgate TV based on the Israeli series The Naked Truth. Phillips, who spent 4 years at Showtime running Dexter, will write the adaptation and will executive produce the project, his first under the 2-year overall deal with Lionsgate TV he signed in June. The Naked Truth is set in a major East Coast metropolitan precinct and follows the officers investigating the disappearance of a teenage girl from a prominent family in the pressure cooker atmosphere of an explosive high-profile case that has implications not just for the family of the victim, but for the cops themselves and the political infrastructure of the city. “It’s about the cops encountering people on the worst day of the citizens’ life,” Phillips said. “It’s a bit of an exploration of the middle class and the challenges we all face; it’s a heartbreaking story about a family in a time of crisis and how everyone deals with it.” Read More »

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Ex-’Dexter’ Showrunner Clyde Phillips Signs Big Overall Deal With Lionsgate Television

By NELLIE ANDREEVA | Sunday June 27, 2010 @ 7:00pm PDTTags: Cable TV, Clyde Phillips, Dexter, Lionsgate TV, Showrunners, TV
Nellie Andreeva

Clyde_PhillipsFormer Dexter executive producer/showrunner Clyde Phillips has inked a two-year, seven-figure overall deal at Lionsgate TV. For Lionsgate, this marks a rare pact with a writer-producer not tied to one of the company’s flagship series, like Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, who is under an overall there, as well as Weeds creator Jenji Kohan and her top lieutenant on the show Matthew Salsberg. But Phillips’ work on Showtime’s Dexter, which he joined after the pilot, as well as his background in both comedy and drama (Phillips also created  the Fox dramedy Get Real and created the NBC comedy Suddenly Susan and the Fox half-hour Parker Lewis) were a major draw, Lionsgate TV president Kevin Beggs said. “These days comedy and drama are overlapping on the best cable series,” Beggs said. “And Phillips is the real deal; it’s hard to find people who are not only brilliant writers but can also manage a production.” Read More »

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