Matt LeBlanc has an upcoming crime drama called Flint in development at CBS, and is slated to both star and executive produce.
The 58-year-old actor established himself as a sitcom icon playing the lovably dimwitted lothario Joey Tribbiani on 10 seasons of Friends from 1994 to 2004.
Although his best-loved work has been in that genre, including his memorable self-parody on Episodes, he is now veering into more serious territory.
His next show Flint will feature him as a Los Angeles police officer who is on the verge of retirement, only to be slapped with a five-year extension of his service.
Stricken with burnout, he starts breaking rules in a bid to get himself fired that counterintuitively turns him into a more effective lawman, via The Wrap.
Evan Katz, who was an executive producer on the hit Kiefer Sutherland show 24, is developing Flint in collaboration with LeBlanc.
LeBlanc shot to worldwide stardom through Friends on NBC, along with Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and the late Matthew Perry.
When the show ended in 2004, he remained with NBC for an ill-starred spin-off called Joey that staggered on for two seasons before being scuttled in 2006.
However he found sitcom success again by playing a fictionalized version of himself on Episodes, co-created by David Crane, who had also co-created Friends.
Starring him alongside Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan, the Hollywood satire ran for five seasons from 2011 to 2017 and won LeBlanc his first Golden Globe.
LeBlanc joined the CBS family with another sitcom called Man with a Plan, a working class family comedy set in Pittsburgh that ran from 2016 to 2020.
He also hosted Top Gear alongside Chris Evans in the UK from 2016 to 2019, leaving because the ‘time commitment and extensive travel’ that the show entailed ‘takes me away from my family and friends more than I’m comfortable with,’ he told the BBC.
Man with a Plan marked his last job as a series regular on a TV show, ending the same year he appeared in the HBO Max Friends reunion hosted by James Corden.
LeBlanc, who has worked intermittently since Friends ended, has been frank about how his wealth from television has allowed him to relax.
By the end of Friends, he and his five main co-stars were earning $1 million apiece per episode, and the reunion special alone reportedly netted him $2.5 million.
‘My favorite thing in the world to do, my absolute favorite thing in the world to do is nothing,’ he remarked in 2018 on the Norwegian-Swedish talk show Sklavan.
‘I’m great at it. I should be a professional nothing. That’s what I could be. I could be really good at that. Because it’s so easy. There’s no rules. “What are you gonna do today?” “I’ll tell you – nothing.” Pretty simple, right?’ he joked.
He noted that he ‘felt really fortunate to be in that position,’ explaining that he was ‘thankful’ for having been ‘successful’ but noting that the 12 years he spent on Friends and then Joey constituted ‘a lot of work.’
