Belushi, TV vets plot courtroom drama

ICM packaging series for actor post-'Jim'

By MICHAEL FLEMING

Belushi

English

Levinson

Here's an unusual group of creative collaborators: Jim Belushi has teamed with Diane English and Barry Levinson for a prospective TV drama that would cast Belushi as a defense attorney character based on the lawyer and TV commentator Mickey Sherman.

ICM is in the process of packaging the series and hasn't brought it yet to studios and networks, but it would mark a switch for Belushi to drama after his long run in the ABC sitcom "According to Jim."

English, the "Murphy Brown" vet who wrote and directed the remake "The Women," teams with Levinson just as Showtime begins airing "Poliwood," the docu he directed about the convergence of celebs on the Democratic and Republican national conventions and its impact on the 2008 presidential campaign.

Sherman penned the memoir "How Can You Defend Those People?," and the idea is for Belushi to play a likable lawyer who defends the guilty and the innocent with equal vigor.

Levinson, who featured Sherman in a cameo in his film "Man of the Year," is best known on the TV front for exec producing "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "Oz"; he most recently exec produced "The Philanthropist." Levinson directed HBO's upcoming Jack Kevorkian biopic "You Don't Know Jack," which stars Al Pacino as the controversial champion of euthanasia.

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