Felicity Huffman, star of Desperate Housewives, will make her television debut four years after being imprisoned for her role in the college admissions scandal.
The actress, widely known for her role as Lynette Scavo on Desperate Housewives for all eight seasons, was sentenced to two weeks in jail in 2019 after pleading guilty to bribing a college admissions consultant $15,000 (£12,100) to falsify her daughter Sophia’s SAT answers.
She was also had to complete 250 hours of community service and pay a $30,000 (£23,800) fine as part of her sentence.
Huffman, 60, will now appear as a guest star on an episode of The Good Doctor, which will also serve as the pilot for The Good Lawyer, the spin-off series.
If approved, the season will follow Joni DeGroot (Kennedy McMann), a lawyer who suffers from OCD.
When Dr. Shaun Murphy (Freddie Highmore) seeks legal counsel to assist him win a case, he turns to Joni, who is new to her prominent law firm.
Huffman will play Janet Stewart, a “well acclaimed attorney and partner at the law firm with a sharp intellect and sarcastic humour” in the pilot.
She is a seasoned veteran who is initially asked to take on the case by Shaun’s mentor, but she is forced to back down when the young lawyer is instead given the obligation to take the lead.
The show, which will run on March 6, will be Huffman’s first television appearance since her brief term in prison.
She was last seen in the Netflix limited series When They See Us, in which she also portrayed a lawyer, prior to the scandal breaking.
She did sign on to a series about Susan Savage, a lady who became the owner of a minor league baseball team after her husband died, after she was released from prison, but that project never got off the ground.
Huffman was hardly the only Hollywood personality to be involved in the college admissions scandal, the mastermind of which was recently sentenced to nearly four years in prison.
Lori Loughlin, star of Full House, was sentenced to two months in prison for paying $500,000 (£411,390) to get her daughters Olivia Jade and Isabella into the University of Southern California.
The Good Doctor is streaming on NOW.
