Aug. 11--The actor and Oscar-winning recording artist Common is executive producing a new TV show about growing up on Chicago's South Side.
The announcement was made Tuesday during Showtime's presentation to the Television Critics Association in Los Angeles. The cable network has greenlit a pilot that will film in Chicago later this year, Deadline reports.
Common (whose birth name is Lonnie Rashid Lynn) grew up in the Calumet Heights neighborhood. According to Variety, the drama will be a coming-of-ager that "revolves around a young African American man on Chicago's South Side."
The show is written and created by fellow Chicago native Lena Waithe, who is also an actor as well as a producer (lending her producing talents most recently to the satirical indie "Dear White People"). Her previous credits include a stint last year as a staff writer on the Fox procedural "Bones."
Her script for the Showtime show is as-yet untitled, but that could be because Spike Lee grabbed grabbed title first. In a 2014 interview with the website The Visibility Project, Waithe talked about a script she was shopping around called "'Chiraq,' which is an hour-long drama I wrote ... it's a drama about gun violence on the South Side of Chicago."
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