EXCLUSIVE: David Cronenberg's science-fiction horror classic Scanners may be headed to the small screen. The Weinstein Co.'s Dimension Films is developing a drama series adaptation of the movies about a group of people with telepathic and telekinetic abilities, with The Hills Have Eyes writer-director Alexandre Aja signed to executive produce the series and potentially direct the pilot.

Dimension was not involved in the original 1981 Scanners film or its sequels, but acquired the rights to the franchise in a development deal several years ago. The original plan was to mount a theatrical remake, with David Goyer tapped to write two drafts, and Rene Malo, Clark Peterson and Pierre David signed as producers. But with the recent resurgence of genre TV dramas like AMC's monster hit The Walking Dead, Dimension started also considering a small-screen adaptation. According to insiders, it was Dimension principal Bob Weinstein and Aja who conceived of the plan to transform the Scanners property into a TV show. Malo, Peterson and David remain attached as executive producers on the series, while Goyer is no longer involved. Dimension is already in talks with potential showrunners to create and run the series. Aja is repped by WME and Industry Entertainment.

EXCLUSIVE: A&E Network has greenlighted for production Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, a two-night, four-hour mini-series starring Pierce Brosnan. Annabeth Gish will co-star in the project, based on Stephen King's bestselling novel. Kelly Rowland also is expected to join the cast of the mini, from Sony Pictures Television, which will premiere on A&E in the fourth quarter of 2011. Mick Garris will direct from a script by Matt Venne. Filming is scheduled to begin next month in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Bag of Bones centers on bestselling novelist Mike Noonan (Brosnan), who is unable to stop grieving after the sudden death of his wife Jo (Gish). A dream inspires him to return to the couple's lakeside retreat in western Maine where he becomes involved in a custody battle between the daughter of an attractive young widow and the child's enormously wealthy grandfather, the mysterious ghostly visitations, the ever-escalating nightmares and the realization that his late wife still has something to tell him.

Bag of Bones is executive produced by Mark Sennett for Mark Sennet Entertainment, Mick Garris for Nice Guy Prods., Stewart Mackinnon for Headline Pictures and Craig Sheftell. Brian Gary and David Davoli are the co-executive producers. Garris, Sennett and Venne had been working on a Bag of Bones adaptation for several years, originally as a feature and then as a mini.

This is the second high-profile miniseries fronted by a movie star to be greenlighted at a A&E Network over the past couple of months. A&E's sibling History in May picked up The Hatfields and McCoys, starring Oscar winner Kevin Costner. CAA-repped Brosnan is already in business with Sony Pictures TV on an international private investigator series project from veteran ER writer-producer Jack Orman. Gish is with Innovative and Thruline.

Wow those 2 would be really good. Add Neil Gaiman's American Gods and you have the holy trinity and please either have them only on the premium cable tv so it would be uncensored

I'd rather have a Sandman series. Maybe we'll get one if American Gods is a hit.

EXCLUSIVE: Fifteen years after horror anthology Tales from the Crypt ended its seven-year-run on HBO, a new TV series based on the popular and controversial 1950s EC Comics anthology is in the works with Gil Adler, producer on the HBO Crypt series, and Andrew Cosby, co-creator of Syfy hit Eureka and co-founder of comic book publisher BOOM! Studios. The new hourlong series will neither be anthological nor related to the HBO show. "It will be an ongoing series that uses characters from the comic books in a more modern context," Cosby said. "It's all about continually elevating the genre, for both existing fans of the source material and mainstream audiences." Cosby and Adler first started discussing reviving the franchise on TV and then approached Joel Eisenberg, whose company with Timothy Owens EMO Films had acquired the rights to the comic books. After a lengthy legal process to make sure that all rights have been properly secured, the TV series project is now moving forward and is being developed by EC Film, Radio & Television, a partnership between William M. Gaines Agent, Inc. -- the corporation representing the intellectual property of the late Crypt creator Gaines run by his daughter Cathy Gaines Mifsud -- and EMO Films. Producing are Adler, Cosby and Steven Sawalich of Articulus Entertainment. Eisenberg will executive produce, while William Gaines' grandson Corey Mifsud will be credited as associate producer.

A detailed pitch and a bible for the new Crypt series have been completed, with producers expected to take the project out shortly. It will be pitched to broadcast networks as part of the current development cycle as well as to cable outlets. (There had been some rumblings about potential interest from HBO sister channel Cinemax, which has returned to original programming.) The producers are considering both a traditional network model and non-traditional route for the project, including fully financing the series, probably as an international co-production, before taking it to U.S. nets.

After months of deal-making, BBC America today officially announced that it has given a 10-episode order to Copper, its first original scripted drama series . The series hails from Canadian-based Cineflix Studios, which has been ramping up scripted development under former AMC executive Christina Wayne. Copper, which centers on a young Irish cop operating in the immigrant communities of 19th century New York, was co-created by Tom Fontana and Will Rokos (Monster’s Ball). Fontana, Rokos, Barry Levinson and Wayne are executive producing. Copper will start production in the fall in Toronto for Summer 2012 premiere. "I really didn't want our first series to be the London cop who gets transferred to Las Vegas," BBC America's general manager Perry Simon quipped in announcing the series at TCA. The Copper news comes on the heels of BBC America's Monday announcement of its first 2 unscripted series, Would You Rather with Graham Norton and Hard Drive with Richard Hammond.

EXCLUSIVE: Welcome to the 1960s, Las Vegas style. CBS has put in development Ralph Lamb, a drama project set in the early '60s from Goodfellas writer Nicholas Pileggi based on the true story of Ralph Lamb, a cowboy-turned-Las Vegas sheriff in the '60s and '70s. CBS TV Studios, which is producing the project, has assembled a formidable feature team. James Mangold (Walk the Line) is on board to direct. He will executive produce with his producing partner Cathy Konrad and another film producer, Arthur Sarkissian (Rush Hour). Pileggi will co-write the script with TV writer Greg Walker (Without a Trace).

Ralph Lamb was Clark County's longest-serving and most famous sheriff who was in charge for two decades -- from 1961 to 1979. Known as the cowboy sheriff as he was often seen riding his horse, Lamb modernized the department, brought in a modern crime lab, assembled the city's first SWAT team and oversaw the merger of the Las Vegas and the county law enforcement agencies into the Metropolitan Police Department. But he was probably best known for his tough stance on the Mafia, which still controlled most of the casinos at the time. He famously roughed up Chicago mobster Johnny Rosselli in public and sent him to jail. After making bail, Rosselli's was never head from again until his corpse was found floating in a 55-gallon oil drum off Miami 10 years later. There has been speculation that that if mobsters were causing too much trouble, Lamb's men simply killed them, but Lamb has denied such murders have ever occurred. The setting of the Ralph Lamb series is similar to Pileggi's non-fiction book Casino, about the Mafia's final glory days in Vegas in the 1970s. Pileggi co-wrote with Martin Scorsese the script for Scorsese's feature adaptation of Casino, just like the two collaborated on Scorsese's 1990 classic Goodfellas, based on Pileggi's book Wiseguy. This is a rare foray into TV for Pileggi, who is attached to a proposed TV series version of Goodfellas. Ralph Lamb brings Mangold back to CBS and CBS TV Studios after directing The 2-2 pilot last season. The pilot went to series, which is executive produced by Robert De Niro, the star of both Casino and Goodfellas. Period dramas set in the '60s are red-hot at the moment, with NBC's The Playboy Club and ABC's Pan Am set to join AMC's Mad Men this fall.

After relaunching original primetime programming with three action series -- Strike Back, The Transporter and The Sector, all done as international co-productions -- Cinemax is taking a different approach with another drama project eyed for a series order, Banshee. The project, described as Walking Tall meets History of Violence, did not come to Cinemax via the international co-production route but was developed at sister pay cable network HBO and has Alan Ball attached as an executive producer. According to the LA Times, Banshee, written by Jonathan Tropper and David Schickler, is set in a small town in Pennsylvania Amish Country and features an enigmatic ex-con/martial arts expert posing as a murdered sheriff who imposes his own brand of justice while also cooking up plans that serve his own interests. Banshee, executive produced by Ball, Tropper, Schickler and Peter Macdissi, is eying a spring start of production. It will not keep Ball away from his hit HBO series True Blood. Ball is already working with the show's writing staff on scripts for Season 5, whose official pickup is imminent.

After bringing one 1990s ABC sitcom star, Home Improvement's Tim Allen, back to primetime with a new comedy series, 20th Century Fox TV is looking to do the same for another, Roseanne Barr. The studio has signed a script deal with the former Roseanne star for a half-hour comedy she will co-write with her boyfriend Johnny Argent. The project, titled Downwardly Mobile, will explore the same territory as Roseanne, revolving around an optimistic blue-collar family living in hard times. Search is underway for a showrunner to board the project before it's taken out to the networks. Barr and Argent are executive producing with Steven Greener who also executive produces Barr's Lifetime reality series Roseanne's Nuts.

So if this is Cinemax producing the show, is it going to be 90% a skin flick?