Fox series ‘Past Life’ drawn from M.J. Rose book
By Joe Meyers, STAFF WRITER (Newstimes.com)

They say that Hollywood is a place where people die of encouragement, so Greenwich novelist M.J. Rose was warned not to get her hopes up when she first heard from her agents two years ago that there was TV interest in the writer’s bestselling thriller, “The Reincarnationist.”

When the Warner Bros. TV division expressed interest in optioning the book in 2008, her agent said, “Don’t get excited.”

Followed by “Nothing ever happens” — meaning that countless new books are optioned every year but few of them ever go any further than that. Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist” and Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” are just two of the major modern novels still gathering dust in Hollywood.

When Warner Bros. talked about writing a pilot script, the agent said, “It will never go to script … never go to pilot.”

“I said, `Enough with never. What’s your track record?,’ ” Rose recalled in a phone interview last week.

After a pilot was filmed, the agent gave the writer a one in four chance that “Past Life” would be picked up as a series.

Last spring, Rose got the word that all of those “nevers” were behind her and “Past Life” would be a series. “In a cab at 23rd and Park …not that I remember or anything,” the writer said, laughing, of the series that will begin its run on Fox this week, with the debut Tuesday night at 9 right after “American Idol.”…

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