Minnie Driver is returning to series TV with a lead role in the CBS drama pilot Hail Mary. The onetime matriarch of FX’s The Riches will play a suburban mom-turned-private eye who teams up with a streetwise hustler to solve crimes. The L Word co-creator Ilene Chaiken recently came on board as exec producer and showrunner. Driver — who snagged an Oscar nomination for Good Will Hunting — guest-starrd on Modern Family last season as a former colleague of Julie Bowen’s Claire.

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Amanda Peet has been locked in for the lead in the NBC pilot Bent. Peet will play a Type A divorced mom who tries not to fall for the “surfer-dude” contractor she hires to redo her kitchen. The single camera comedy is from writer/executive producer Tad Quill of Scrubs fame and is part of Quill’s overall deal with UMS. It also brings Peet back into the NBC fold, where she starred in Aaron Sorkin’s Saturday Night Live-esque Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Meanwhile, sources say Minnie Driver is close to signing on to the NBC pilot, Free Agents. It is an adaptation of a British series about co-workers at a Hollywood talent agency – one getting over a divorce and the other a broken engagement. It’s from Party Down’s John Enbom. Driver has not been a TV regular since co-starring with Eddie Izzard in FX’s critically hailed but low-rated The Riches, which ended in 2008.