According to Deadline, former Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica producer Ronald D. Moore has set up a new pilot at ABC, a western TV Series titled Hangtown. With no official confirmation or denial from ABC as of yet, information surrounding the show remains speculative, but Deadline offered this as a description for the concept, should it go to series:
“Described as a Western with a procedural overlay, Hangtown is set in the early 1900s in a frontier town that’s begun to rapidly expand with the coming of the railroad. It centers around three characters: the Marshal, a Matt Dillon/Clint Eastwood type who prefers to solve crimes by his instinct, a young Doctor from the East Coast who is interested in using the new field of forensics to solve crimes, and a young woman writer who is trying to sell dime novels to the publishing houses in New York about crime in the Wild West. Every week the instincts of the Marshal, the science of the doctor, and the young woman’s drive to tell a rousing good yarn to her editors, combine to solve crimes in a wide-open, lawless town.”
Moore is coming fresh off the back of the failure of his police-fantasy drama 17th Precinct to get picked up by NBC, despite an impressive cast. Whether or not Hangtown has a better chance of making it to air remains to be seen.