Ron Moore's Western TV Series HANGTOWN Gets Picked up by ABC

Battlestar Galactica executive producer Ron Moore and Caprica writer Matt Roberts have just sold a new western drama TV series to ABC called Hangtown. I a big fan of Moores work, I think the guy is a great storyteller, I loved both Galactica and Caprica, it's a shame that Caprica didn't get picked back up. I think it's awesome we are going to see these guys bring us a new TV western though, and it sounds like it's going to be pretty awesome.

The series is described as a "Western with a procedural overlay, Hangtown is set in the early 1900s in a frontier town that’s begun rapidly expanding with the coming of the railroad. It centers on 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."

I love this pitch! With the talent they have putting it together this could end up being a pretty badass new series. This is actually the second Western series that ABC has picked up, the first one was a show called Gunslinger, which also sounds like a cool series.

Other networks are getting into the western genre series as well, TNT is developing one with Bruce C. McKenna and Danny Cannon called Gateway, set in the 1880s. NBC recently picked up a new western from Friday Night Lights producers Peter Berg and Liz Heldens. There's also AMC's upcoming series Hell On Wheels, set during the building of the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1860s, and A&E also has a pilot called Longmire, about a widowed sheriff in Absaroka County, Wyoming. 

So, as you can see westerns are making a huge comeback, and as a fan of the genre I couldn't be more excited! What are your thoughts on Moores western getting picked up, and the rest of these western drama's in development?