Given the huge success of zombie telly comic adaptation The Walking Dead both in the States and over here, the announcement last July that Frank Darabont – who, after all, had been the one to get the series on the air – had been unceremoniously dumped from the show came as a shock. But now it looks like he’s bouncing back on the small screen, landing a pilot for crime series LA Noir at US network TNT.

Darabont will work with film producer Michael De Luca on the series, which adapts John Buntin’s book LA Noir: The Struggle For The Soul Of America’s Most Seductive City. The book follows  LAPD chief William Parker and his battles in the 1940s and 50s against mobster Mickey Cohen. If Cohen sounds familiar, he’s also part of the plot of incoming crime pic Gangster Squad.

From the sounds of it, Darabont is happy to be back working on another project that gets him giddy: “Noir is a passion of mine, so I feel blessed to delve into a project that speaks in the hardboiled vernacular,” he said in a statement. “John Buntin’s superb book, though non-fiction, is our touchstone and inspiration for the stories we’ll be telling, weaving fiction throughout the facts and facts throughout the fiction. The book provides elements that are irresistible, a big canvas with endless possibilities. The goal is to deliver on the tone that the title LA Noir promises: a smart, gritty, authentic, period noir drama.”

Right now, the pilot is all that has been ordered, and there’s always a chance it might not be commissioned as a full series. But given the talent involved already and despite the fact that it’ll likely be an expensive period production, it would seem to be a solid fit for the channel that has flourished with cop series (The Closer, Rizzoli & Isles) and has been known to splash out on bigger projects (the Steven Spielberg-backed Falling Skies).

But flashing back for a moment to Darabont’s abortive tenure as executive producer on Walking Dead, new details have emerged as to his original plans for the first episode of series 2 of the show. The expensive, ambitious and very cool, Black Hawk down-style flashback to the earlier days zombie outbreak probably wouldn’t have won him many fans with cost-cutting cable network types…