Yahoo Finance Felicity Huffman lands new TV pilot on ABC after serving time in college cheating scandal
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 – along with TV star Lori Loughlin and her fashion designer husband and scores of other prominent and wealthy people around the country– in the spring of 2019 on federal charges of lying, cheating and paying bribes to get their children into elite colleges and universities.
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.
Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, asserted for more than a year after being indicted, that they were innocent of charges they paid $500,000 in bribes to get their two daughters into the University of Southern California as fake rowing recruits.
In May, they reversed course and pleaded guilty, and were sentenced to two months and five respectively in minimum security prisons in California. Both are now serving their sentences.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Felicity Huffman new TV pilot planned after serving prison sentence
