Mummy Hottie Fehr Gets NBC Series

June 25 -- After teaming up with Brendan Fraser to kick undead ass in The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, Oded Fehr is ready for prime-time. That's what NBC thinks, anyway.

Variety reports that the 30-year-old Israeli hunk has signed a deal to star in Undercover, which will make its debut on the peacock net this fall. The new series is the brainchild of screenwriter Shane Salerno, who received partial writing credit on both John Singleton's Shaft and Armageddon.

In an X-Files-ish vein, Undercover will reportedly feature Fehr as a straitlaced FBI hostage negotiator who's placed in command of a special-ops undercover unit. Series co-stars include Latino beefcake Jon Seda (Price of Glory and TV's Homicide: Life on the Street and Oz) and Vera Farmiga (15 Minutes).

The series was originally developed with '90s heartthrob Grant Show in the lead role — the Melrose Place hottie will apparently remain the focus of the pilot episode, with Fehr replacing him in episode two. It's also possible that the first two episodes will air as a two-hour pilot, with the passing of the baton occurring in the second hour.

Fehr, whose small-screen resume consists of a season on British television's The Knock and bit parts in the ABC miniseries Cleopatra, is best known for playing warrior priest Ardeth Bay, the debonair, swashbuckling sidekick to Fraser's Mummy-battling Rick O'Connell. The Mummy Returns, the 11th-highest-grossing film in theaters this past weekend, has sold $196 million worth of tickets to date and is a lock to eventually top $200 million.

"This doesn't happen, landing a guy off a $200 million movie," Salerno tells Variety. "It was a very long seduction process."

The film resume of Undercover's executive producer would have to be considered spotty at best, but he does have some TV cred: Salerno worked as a writer on crime series guru Dick Wolf's New York Undercover, a critically lauded Fox series ignominiously axed in 1998.