Got Milch? HBO comes back for more

We’d think that bigshot series creator David Milch had burned a bridge or two at HBO after he decided to scuttle his successful, praised and beloved Deadwood in favor of the incomprehensible, anger-making John from Cincinnati, a series about a family of surfing scumbags that in its original incarnation had nothing to do with surfing at all.

But we would be wrong.

Hours after HBO pulled the plug on John in wake of its season finale, the floundering-without-its-Sopranos network announced they’ve got Milch is cooking up another series.

This one goes back to safe, familiar, unchallenging turf. . The man who made his bones writing Hill Street Blues and created NYPD Blue is working up a project about a Vietnam vet who joins the New York City Police Department in the 1970s.

The story is based loosely on Milch’s collaborator and fellow Blue exec producer Bill Clark, who’s working with Milch on this one.

The project was first put into development at HBO a few years ago. Back then, Milch described the lead character as a guy who was “recruited as a soldier while he was overseas, to come back as a disaffected veteran and infiltrate the antiwar movement, as a shortcut into the New York City police force as a detective.”

It is, he said, a “tragic story” because the main character has to pretend to disavow his beliefs.

Here’s hoping they hire Ed O’Neill!

–Tabloid Baby