EXCLUSIVE: In March 2005, one freshman ABC drama, David E. Kelley‘s Boston Legal, wrapped its season in the Sunday 10 PM slot to make room for another rookie, Grey’s Anatomy starring Ellen Pompeo, which launched in the time period a week later.

Twenty one years after that handover, Pompeo and Kelley have come together for a new drama project, Not a Sound, in which Pompeo, known for her role as Dr. Meredith Grey on Grey’s Anatomy, will play another medical professional. It has been set up at Hulu for development through 20th Television where the Kelley was once based for 22 years and where Pompeo is under an overall deal.

Not a Sound is written by David E. Kelley Productions President Matthew Tinker and Annakate Chappell — who worked together as writers on Kelley’s Big Sky –– based on Heather Gudenkauf’s novel of the same name, with Azazel Jacobs (His Three Daughters) set to direct.

In it, after losing her hearing in a devastating hit-and-run, disgraced ER nurse Amelia Winn (Pompeo) and her fiercely loyal service dog discover the murdered body of a former colleague — pulling Amelia into a deadly mystery that could finally reveal the truth about the accident that changed her life.

Chappell executive produces alongside Jacobs and David E. Kelley Prods.’ Kelley and Tinker and Calamity Jane’s Pompeo and Laura Holstein. 20th Television is the studio.

Pompeo recently received two green lights from Hulu, for a second season of anthology series Good American Family, which she is executive producing, and dramedy pilot Chicks, which she is starring in and executive produces. She is partnered on both with Katie Robbins.

Additionally, Pompeo stars in and executive produces ABC’s venerable medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, which is headed into its 23rd season. She also executive produced spinoff series Station 19 and is an executive producer on the upcoming Grey’s offshoot set in West Texas, which will premiere in midseason 2027. Pompeo is repped by CAA, Linden Entertainment and Hansen Jacobson.

Tinker oversees David E. Kelley Prods.’ slate across film, television, and new media. He executive produces for the company the upcoming second seasons of Apple TV’s Presumed Innocent and Margo’s Got Money Troubles as well as the new Netflix series Myron Bolitar. As a writer, he worked on Kelley’s ABC drama series Big Sky, which 20th TV co-produced with A+E Studios, alongside Chappell. Tinker is repped by CAA and Yorn, Levine, Barnes.

Chappell is a supervising producer on CBS’ hit drama series Tracker and is writing the feature Bingo, with Robin Wright attached to direct and star. She is repped by CAA, Echo Lake and Yorn, Levine, Barnes.

Jacobs’ 2024 Netflix film His Three Daughters earned him a Gotham Award and Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay. In television, Jacobs served as co-writer and executive producer on Doll & Em for Sky/HBO and directed both seasons. He is repped by CAA, manager Stuart Manishil at Novo, and attorney Jerry Dasti.

Gudenkauf was repped in the deal by Lucy Stille at Lucy Stille Literary on behalf of Marianne Merola at Brandt & Hochman Literary agents.

The long, winding road of “Coyote vs. Acme,” the latest in a long line of live-action films based on the “Looney Tunes” characters, is about as complex and tangled as the conspiracy Wile E. Coyote and his allies spend the film‘s runtime unpacking. Shot from March to May 2022 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, “Coyote vs. Acme” was shelved by Warner Bros. the following year for the purposes of obtaining a tax write-off, one of many projects — most infamously a “Batgirl” movie — to be canned by David Zaslav’s company before it ever received a real release. Warner Bros. eventually reversed the decision, but still wouldn’t distribute the movie. So, for two years, before Ketchup Entertainment finally acquired it in March 2025, the team behind the film, a charming courtroom comedy mixing live-action with animation, had no idea if their work would ever actually be seen.

“I heard about the news that Ketchup had acquired the movie maybe 24 hours before everyone else found out, and I absolutely could not believe it,” director Dave Green said during a recent interview with IndieWire. “At that point in time, I was kind of finding a place of acceptance that, hey, we made a movie that we’re really proud of and we love, and it’s something that we can own in our hearts, but maybe it’s something people will never see. The day I heard that news, I was in total shock. I remain in total shock.”

“It is a miracle that we are sitting together, getting to talk about the movie today,” he continued. “It was a wild ride, and I would say making any movie is a gargantuan task. You’re pushing a boulder up a hill, and as a director, you are trained to deal with things that you don’t expect all the time. What I saw through this process — the incredible support of everyone online, and friends, and other filmmakers, and people who had seen the film, and people who just wanted to see the film speaking out and wanting to support the movie, it was such an incredible miracle.”

Green, whose other directorial work includes the sci-fi adventure film “Earth to Echo” and 2016’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows,” has been attached to “Coyote vs. Acme” since 2019, when he was hired to direct the film when it was in development at Warner Bros. The movie, based on a satirical 1990 New Yorker piece about a lawsuit from the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote suing the Acme Corporation for the many faulty products he employs.

A child of the ’90s, Green grew up watching the Coyote and Roadrunner series of cartoons as well as modern-at-the-time spiritual successors like “Tiny Toon Adventures,” “Animaniacs,” and “Pinky and the Brain.” He loved the classic shorts of animators Chuck Jones and Tex Avery because of their sophistication and lack of sentimentality compared to other animated movies.

“All of them were just so funny to me because they were violent and they were irreverent. They weren’t saccharine: they were sarcastic and subversive and weird,” Green said. “That was always the fabric of what ‘Looney Tunes’ was to me as a kid and in the DNA from the very beginning. And so, in making this movie, we tried to carry that torch the best we could, and and speak as much as we could with that tonality and that voice, and keep it weird and keep it smart and sophisticated and dark and funny.”

The resulting film carries much of the slapstick spirit that has made “Looney Tunes” such an enduring franchise. But like other “Looney Tune” big-screen features such as “Space Jam” and “Back in Action,” it also stretches the set pieces into a proper, full-length story. The result is a daffy (pun intended) parody of conspiracy theory and legal thrillers that sees Wile and his legal team, put upon personal injury attorney Kevin Avery (Will Forte) and his ambitious niece Paige (Lana Condor), attempt to uncover the corruption stewing inside the mega-conglomerate Acme involving the abuse and mistreatment of cartoons.

Similar to the other “Looney Tunes” films, “Coyote vs. Acme” derives much of its humor from combining live-action performances with animated characters in a “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” fashion. To plan ahead for the mix between the two mediums, Green had a team of storyboard artists map out every scene in a similar manner as to how a Pixar or Disney movie gets made, mapping out all the beats and jokes and where the animated characters would go ahead of the actual live-action shooting. During production, the filmmakers employed David Barclay, a puppeteer who worked on several Jim Henson projects such as “The Dark Crystal” or “Return of the Jedi” and served as the chief puppeteer on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Barclay built a life-size Coyote puppet for the actors to perform with, and Green had the cast shoot most scenes twice: one heavily choreographed to their original plans, and one more spontaneous take with the puppet so that the interactions between animated and human characters could work naturally in the final product.

“The crazy thing is, and I didn’t realize this when I signed on, Wile E. Coyote does not exist,” Green joked.

Unlike “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” the final product uses a blend of 2D animation with some 3D animation, handled by the British company DNEG. Green chose to use 3D for certain shots so he could better control elements like lighting, compositing, shadow, and an added grain effect on top of Wile that couldn’t necessarily be controlled with completely traditional 2D animation. With all the moving parts, directing the film sometimes became extraordinarily complicated. The second day of filming saw the team film a gag sequence where Wile attempts to bring an endless supply of gadgets and weapons through a courtroom metal detector, with about 40 to 50 background actors whom Green had to direct to find the eyeline of a completely invisible character. It was the most challenging sequence he had to film, although he also called it his favorite.

Although “Coyote vs. Acme” is a largely lighthearted film filled with physical comedy of that nature, the script by Samy Burch isn’t completely frivolous. Its storyline spins the futile, determined chase of Wile to one day capture Roadrunner as something admirable, and applies that underdog mentality to the average person trying to navigate a late capitalist landscape that values profits over people. It’s a moral that’s resonant with the journey the film itself had to finally find a proper theatrical release. And Green noted that, in the wake of more recent news involving corporate mergers, the film just feels more timely now than it did when it was shot four years ago.

“I think the themes that we were talking about when we were making the movie have only become more relevant since we’ve made the movie,” Green said. “I watched the movie after all of the news broke, and I could not believe the kind of surreal meta whirlpool that the movie had kind of become. It felt like a hall of mirrors, where it almost felt like we had shot the movie after the news had broke. It was surreal, but it’s that we all deal with every single day in our daily lives, which is trying to have voices and autonomy in a very corporate world.”

Ketchup Entertainment will release “Coyote vs. Acme” in theaters August 28.

As Adults returns tonight for Season 2, the show apparently has Julia Fox‘s witchy ways to thank.

Lucy Freyer, who plays Billie Schaeffer on the FX comedy, recently revealed that the Season 1 guest star “put a curse on” the Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw-created series, which releases all Season 2 episodes Thursday at 9pm ET/6pm PT on Hulu.

“She was like, ‘I wanna come back next season, and the season you don’t bring me back is the season you’re gonna get canceled,’” she told Refinery29 Australia. “And I was like, she put a curse on us, and I believe it. And now, she has to be in every season of the show for as long as it runs. And I’m like, ‘OK!’”

Freyer added, “The fact that she wants to come back, this feels like a blessing. She’s the best. She improvs so much, and she’s so funny. They wrote the script for her, obviously, both times. And then, there were times she’d come in, she’d be like, ‘OK, I don’t think I’d say this, I think I’d say this.’”

In Adults, a group of five 20-somethings in New York City attempt to master adulthood while sharing their friend Samir’s (Malik Elassal) family home he has to himself. The show also stars Freyer, Owen Thiele, Amita Rao and Jack Innanen.