M.J. Rose

Click the photo below to watch sneak peeks of Past Life, which premieres tomorrow night, right after American Idol!

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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David Hudgins and Kelli Giddish Discover Their Past Life

The new Fox series, Past Life, created by Friday Night Lights writer David Hudgins stars Kelli Giddish and Nick Bishop as an unlikely pair of past-life detectives who investigate whether what is happening to you today is the result of who you were before? The series premieres this Tuesday, February 9th at 9 PM before it moves to its regular timeslot, Thursday nights at 9 PM starting February 11th. We had a chance to speak with the show’s creator, Hudgins, and it’s star, Giddish, to discuss the series, the premise, the cast and reincarnation. This is what they had to say:

For starters, Kelli could you tell us a little bit about how you first became involved with the series and maybe some of the acting challenges you found stepping into the role of Dr. McGinn?

Kelli Giddish: Well, there is a pilot season every year and this is actually one of the first projects I went out on probably about a year ago, last January. I really loved the character and went right in for it. Actually David and Deran Sarafian, the director of the pilot, and Lou Pitt, were all down in Baltimore and I was living in New York at the time. I went in and tested and it went from there. They had found Nick Bishop and so it kind of just rolled into a project from there…

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