Tony Shalhoub joins the cast of 'BrainDead'

NEW YORK, Feb. 4 (UPI) -- Emmy Award-winning actor Tony Shalhoub has joined the cast of BrainDead, a new comic-thriller set in Washington, CBS announced.

To premiere this summer, the series comes from Robert and Michelle King, creators and executive producers of The Good Wife. The cast of BrainDead includes Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Tveit, Danny Pino and Nikki M. James.

Shalhoub will play Red Wheatus, who is described in press notes as "a hard-drinking, fun-loving Republican senator who has spent decades in Washington making deals, until a radical transformation turns him into a health-conscious extremist who would rather destroy the government than compromise."

"We're thrilled that Tony Shalhoub will be joining BrainDead," the Kings said in a statement Thursday. "He's funny, dramatic, subtle, and broad when he needs to be. To our minds, he can play anything. We were thinking of making the character a 12-year-old blind girl hunting for her mother in Belgium to see what he did with that."

Shalhoub, 62, is best known for his work on TV's Monk and Wings.