Felicity Huffman to Appear in ‘Good Doctor’ Spinoff
Written by on January 12, 2023
Felicity Huffman is heading back to TV screens in her first onscreen role since her involvement in the college admissions scandal.
The actress, 60, is set to appear in an embedded pilot episode of The Good Lawyer, a legal spinoff of ABC’s popular medical drama The Good Doctor, according to Deadline. The episode is set to air during The Good Doctor‘s sixth season on March 6.
Huffman will guest star as Janet Stewart, a “highly regarded attorney and partner at the law firm with a fierce intellect and dry wit,” according to the outlet.
Her character will be tapped to represent Freddie Highmore’s Dr. Shaun Murphy, who is looking to win a case in the episode. However, she’ll eventually be replaced by young lawyer Joni DeGroot (Kennedy McMann) after Shaun decides that he prefers Joni to represent him.
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Huffman’s onscreen role comes a little over two years after Huffman completed her full sentence in the college admissions scandal, which included jail time, community service and supervised release.
In May 2019, Huffman pleaded guilty to paying disgraced admissions consultant Rick Singer $15,000 to have a proctor change her daughter Sophia’s answers after she took the SAT test.
Huffman served 11 days of her 14-day prison sentence in October 2019. She was also sentenced to 250 hours of community service and was on supervised release for one year.
Her husband, Shameless star William H. Macy, was not charged.
Throughout the scandal, Huffman appeared in three projects: Ava DuVernay’s miniseries When They See Us, which was released in May 2019; Netflix’s Otherhood, which dropped in July 2019; and the Amy Jo Johnson-directed film Tammy’s Always Dying, which hit streaming services on May 1, 2020.
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In November 2020, it was announced that Huffman would be headlining a new ABC half-hour comedy, which has only been identified on her IMDb page as the Sacramento River Cats project. The news marked her first project since her involvement in the scandal.
Deadline previously reported that the show, written by Becky Hartman Edwards, was inspired by Susan Savage, the real-life owner of the Sacramento River Cats, a Triple-A baseball team.
The series follows Huffman as a woman who inherits her husband’s minor-league baseball team after his sudden death. She attempts to navigate her new normal with the help of her son, played by Zack Gottsagen, a baseball lover with Down syndrome, per Deadline.
“She is honored and grateful to be a part of this project,” a source close to Huffman told PEOPLE at the time.
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Huffman, who previously won an Emmy for her work on ABC’s Desperate Housewives, is also set to executive produce the series alongside Edwards and Savage.
