Steven Soderbergh: Show runner

In theaters Friday: Madea’s Witness Protection, Magic Mike, Ted
New on Blu-ray: 21 Jump Street, The Artist, Mirror Mirror, Wrath of the Titans

With initial reviews of Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series Newsroom coming in mixed at best, another Oscar winner’s name has popped up this week as a potential high-profile show runner for the premium cable channel: Former Baton Rougean Steven Soderbergh.

As he’s long discussed, the Traffic and Ocean’s 11 icon is on schedule to retire from the director’s chair early next year—after filming a thriller called The Bitter Pill and a Liberace biopic called Behind the Candelabra—but in a new interview with Reuters promoting Magic Mike, he hints that TV might be where he is headed.

Rarely, if ever, one to repeat himself, Soderbergh could thrive in the serial format of high-end cable drama—think: AMC’s Breaking Bad or HBO’s John Adams series. But what would it be? A baseball fanatic who took Moneyball to the starting gate two years ago only to be axed over creative differences might want to tackle a drama surrounding his favorite sport. He’s also never directed an historical epic and has been talking up an idea for a version of Cleopatra with Catherine Zeta-Jones for years. A series not unlike recent hit Rome but set in ancient Egypt and staring the Oscar-winning wife of Michael Douglas— Soderbergh’s Liberace—could gain a lot of interest.

The prospect of Soderbergh breaking his impending retirement to create a series for HBO is one of the more tantalizing bits of entertainment fodder to chew on so far this summer. But Soderbergh is no stranger HBO. Execs there recently helped fund Candelabra, and Soderbergh produced one season of HBO’s political lobbying satire series K-ville which launched the careers of Mad Men star John Slattery and In Plain Sight‘s Mary McCormick in 2003. Check out the original trailer for the series below: