Felicity Huffman lands in comedy pilot for ABC
Felicity Huffman, the Oscar-nominated actress and Emmy-winning TV star who was convicted and served a brief sentence for her role in the national college admissions cheating scandal, is still employable in Hollywood: She’s got a new job.
Huffman, 57, will co-star in a new baseball comedy pilot for ABC, the network confirmed to USA Today Monday.
The untitled series is inspired by Susan Savage, the real-life owner of the Triple-A baseball team the Sacramento River Cats, the minor-league affiliate of the San Francisco Giants.
The project was described by Deadline as “a funny, surprising and occasionally heartbreaking half-hour about love, loss, family and Triple-A baseball.”
Huffman plays a suddenly widowed woman who inherits her husband’s beloved team and is forced to cope with the help of family, including a son played by Zack Gottsagen (“The Peanut Butter Falcon”) and the Sacramento community at large.
“This is the story of a woman navigating grief, local politics and the business of sports and learning not just to adjust, but to thrive,” Deadline reported.
A pilot doesn’t necessarily make it on the air, but it’s still a paid job and suggests Huffman’s much- chronicled legal woes and status as a convicted felon have not permanently benched her in Hollywood.
Huffman also has a history at ABC, having starred in three successful and critically acclaimed series on the network: “Sports Night,” “Desperate Housewives” and “American Crime.”
She garnered major award nominations for all three series, including winning an Emmy for her role in “Desperate Housewives.”
This is the first job Huffman has gotten since she was indicted in the spring of 2019. Huffman was specifically charged with paying someone to change her daughter’s answers on her SAT to get a higher score. She pleaded guilty almost immediately, issued a tearful statement apologizing and was sentenced to 14 days in a federal minimum-security prison in California.
In October 2019, she was released early from the Federal Correctional Institution Dublin after serving 11 days of her two-week sentence.
Huffman also was sentenced to a $30,000 fine, supervised release for one year, which has since expired, and 250 hours of community service for paying $15,000 to have someone correct answers on the SAT exam of her elder daughter, Sophia.