A veteran television producer who was showrunner on “Rescue Me” — an Emmy winner as part of the team behind “Murphy Brown” and again as a writer on “The Larry Sanders Show” — has joined “Rake,” a legal drama set up at Fox, Nellie Andreeva reports on Deadline.com.

Peter Tolan joins as exec producer and showrunner on the project, which has a pilot production commitment plus series penalty from Fox, the piece reports.

“Tolan succeeds Paul Attanasio, who was originally attached as showrunner when ‘Rake’ was taken out to broadcast and cable networks in late September but had to pull out before the deal with Fox was completed because of other commitments,” Andreeva writes. “’Rake’ is based on the popular Australian series whose co-creator Peter Duncan will write the U.S. adaptation under Tolan’s supervision.”

Andreeva adds: “Like ‘Rescue Me’ — toplined by Denis Leary, who co-created the series with Tolan — ‘Rake’ is a starring vehicle with a flawed character at the center. It also has a similar sensibility of a drama with comedic overtones. ‘Rake’ follows the chaotic world of criminal defense lawyer Cleaver Greene (Kinnear). Brilliant, iconoclastic and innately self-destructive, he has a mind-numbing lack of discretion and a total inability to pause before speaking his mind. From bigamists to cannibals and everything in between, the clients Cleaver loves most are those whose cases appear to be utterly hopeless without him realizing that he, himself, is perhaps the most desperate case of all.”

“Rake” comes from Sony Pictures TV and Essential Media.