Variety reports that the cable network has chosen not to pick up the series, starring McGregor and based on a novel by Jonathan Franzen.

The bestselling novel tells the story of a troubled Midwestern family over a span of several decades, from the mid-20th century to Christmas in the new millennium.

Shot in February, the pilot was directed and adapted by Noah Baumbach, known for his work on the Ben Stiller movie Greenberg.

It featured a cast including Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rhys Ifans, Chris Cooper, Greta Gerwig and Dianne West.

McGregor recently starred opposite Emily Blunt in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.

He will next be seen in the drama The Impossible with Naomi Watts.

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Joining Nanni Moretti, whose presidency of the jury was announced in January, will be four men and four women, with the usual mix of star glamour and serious-minded cinephilia.

Two of the jurors are British: actor Ewan McGregor and writer-director Andrea Arnold. The latter, particularly, owes much to Cannes’ influence, as her first two films, Red Road and Fish Tank, both won the third place jury prize (in 2006 and 2009) after competing for the Palme d’Or.

France has supplied veteran actor Emmanuelle Devos, probably best known internationally for the 2001 thriller Read My Lips, and eccentric designer Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Oscar-winning writer-director Alexander Payne is the sole US representative on the jury; his only film in competition to date has been About Schmidt in 2002.

The panel is rounded out by: German actor Diane Kruger, whose most high profile film is (arguably) Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds; Palestinian actor Hiam Abbass, whose Lemon Tree was an international hit in 2008; and Haiti-born director Raoul Peck, best known for the documentary Lumumba, about the Congolese president.

The Cannes film festival opens on 16 May.

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Velvet Goldmine’s opening epigram – “Although what you are about to see is a work of fiction, it should nevertheless be played at maximum volume” – could be equally well applied to Ewan McGregor’s CV. Everyone’s favourite Davidoff-scented Scotsman has always been capable of high volume. From Shallow Grave and Trainspotting to Moulin Rouge! and last year’s Beginners, the roles he’s picked have rarely lacked a subversive edge. This week’s Salmon Fishing In The Yemen, an altogether gentler adventure, gives the perfect excuse to delve into the McGregor tackle-box and sort the hot tuna from the rancid sprats.

ESSENTIAL VIEWING: Trainspotting (1996)

Renton is still Ewan McGregor’s definitive film role – and if you’re from anywhere near America, where Trainspotting found itself subtitled, it’s probably still counted as his only foreign-language part. We’re only kinda kidding about that, because McGregor’s command of Irving Welsh’s slang lends the grimy smacktacular a syntax of all its own, although you’d need to be fluent in Leith jargon to decipher all of it. With his shaved head, toothpick-thin frame and deathly pallor, you wouldn’t know whether to feed Renton up or hose him down (after that loo scene, it’s definitely the latter). No matter, his easy charm fits in perfectly alongside Johnny Lee Miller, Ewen Bremner and Kevin McKidd, while his manic energy courses through the veins of Danny Boyle’s film. Choose life? ‘Course he did.

ESSENTIAL VIEWING: Moulin Rouge! (2001)

With McGregor on the cusp of big things, this looked like a ballsy choice. Baz Luhrmann’s high-stepping spectacular could easily have been more folly than folie, and musical history is littered with actors whose voices haven’t matched their thespian talents. But McGregor succeeds where Marlon Brando (Guys And Dolls) and Pierce Brosnan (Mamma Mia!) failed, and produces a credible vocal performance as Parisian scribe Christian. Besides, if you can handle Jim Broadbent belting out ‘Like A Virgin’ then there’s little to fear McGregor’s breathy rendition of ‘Come What May’ or the voluptuously saucy romance he conjures up Nicole Kidman’s fishnet fantasy girl.

ESSENTIAL VIEWING: Shallow Grave (1994)

Long before the casting of The Beach temporarily soured things between actor and director, McGregor and Danny Boyle’s partnership yielded dark alchemy in the shape of Trainspotting and this, one of the blackest comedies ever committed to celluloid. Set in Edinburgh, filmed in Glasgow and possibly inspired in hell, it crams more death, drugs and dismemberment into its trim runtime than a weekend at Tony Montana’s. McGregor is the inaptly-named Alex Law, a louche urban professional and flatmate of the equally obnoxious David (Christopher Eccleston) and Juliet (Kerry Fox), who come into possession of one of those bits of movie luggage that invariably bring bloody moider in their wake (see also: No Country For Old Men, Pulp Fiction, Kiss Me Deadly). The flatmates’ moral dilemma – to keep the cash or hand it over – gives the cast’s resident Scotsman plenty of chance to flaunt all his persuasive charm, while the climax… well, does he survive it? You decide.

RECOMMENDED: The Ghost (2010)

Roman Polanski’s stock may not be exactly soaring in the world at large but actors continue to queue round the block to work with him – and you can see why. McGregor’s turn came in this adaptation of Robert Harris’s political potboiler, a juicy role that offered just the kind of morally-compromised character he excels at playing. That man – known only as ‘The Ghost’ – does a hack-for-hire writing job for discredited ex-PM Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), an exiled politico who wants to set his Iraq war record straight. As it slowly dawns on the Ghost that the toxic tale is far from over, you can imagine the likes of Hackman, Beatty or Pacino owning this kind of role back in ‘70s, but McGregor does a manful job of carrying a thriller that’s much longer on dialogue than set pieces. A register of discomfort, a note of fear and a sustained sense of disappointment all add up to a character who creeps passively through a personal New England hell.

RECOMMENDED: Big Fish (2003)

The younger Edward Bloom to Albert Finney’s older model, McGregor brings a lightness of touch to this charmingly oddball fairy tale. He shares the screen with werewolves, conjoined twins and big hair giants – we think we even spotted Trainspotting’s cold turkey at one point – in one of those fantasies that seem to flow only “from the imagination of Tim Burton”. His screen time is limited – those looking for more McGregor for their money might want to turn to his equally good turns in Beginners or I Love You Phillip Morris – but he’s a big presence in the film and convincingly nails the tricky Southern accent in likeable fashion. Even if we’re not sure we can believe a word he says.

FOR THE FAN: Down With Love (2003)

If you’re ever pining for that innocent time when Doris Day and Rock Hudson grabbed the romantic comedy and dragged it out for martinis and dancing, there’s fun to be had in Peyton Reed’s pre-Mad Men confection. With Ewan McGregor to the fore as Catcher Block, a conceited star reporter with matinee looks and an ego to match, and Renée Zellweger as the feminist writer he has a cynical eye on, it takes the outmoded attitudes of the ‘50s and gives them a darn good razzing. The dapper McGregor makes a suave “man’s man, ladies’ man, man about town” and the two stars even share a musical moment that will delight those Moulin Rouge! fans hankering for a little more from those honeyed vocal chords.

ONE TO AVOID: Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace (1999)

Cassandra can keep dreaming and The Island can breathe easy because The Phantom Menace takes the honours in this category. It’s not that it’s McGregor’s worst performance – though his Alec Guinness impression just serves to remind us that he’s not Alec Guinness – or that this is the biggest stinker on his resume; merely that its mediocrity has endured thanks to all those re-releases. In fairness, he’s not helped by having to regularly deliver cloth-eared dialogue (You have a bad feeling about this buster?), but the results still aren’t too clever. He may be nephew to Wedge Antilles (aka Denis Lawson), but McGregor’s stint as a trainee Jedi is best consigned to the nearest intergalactic trash compactor.

Brothers Colin and Ewan McGregor follow up their documentary The Battle of Britain with a film exploring Bomber Command, a rarely-told story from the Second World War.

The film focuses primarily on the men who fought and died in the skies above occupied Europe, with numerous examples of individual heroism and extraordinary collective spirit, and Colin learns to fly the key aircraft of the campaign: the Lancaster bomber. But this is also the story of a controversy that has lasted almost 70 years.

The programme covers six years of wartime operations, and traces the obstacles and challenges that were overcome as the RAF developed and deployed the awesome fighting force that was Bomber Command.

The Scottish actor was planning to make his directorial debut on a movie about a 1968 yacht race. He had been researching the real-life story, he planned to pen the script himself, and he was even going to work on the project with his wife, production designer Eve Mavrakis. Then he found out that great minds think alike, and some other great mind had already bogarted his idea. He told Nylon Guys Magazine: “My wife was going to design it, I wasn’t going to be in it. And then I found out someone else is doing it. I was gutted.”

McGregor has apparently been toying with the idea of directing for a while now. In an interview with the Santa Monica Mirror last June, he joked, “The real reason I would like to direct is so that I can turn up at work and not take off my clothes. It seems like every day I turn up for work I have to take off my clothes and put on someone else’s clothes so it would be quite nice to just wear my own clothes all day.”

On a more serious note, McGregor said that he wasn’t interested in directing just for the hell of it, but that he wanted to find a particular story that fascinated him enough to justify settling into the director’s chair. As he said at the time, “I’m still waiting for that story to find me.”

Sadly, that story won’t be the yacht-race tale that had intrigued him, but hopefully he’ll find something else that catches his attention. He definitely hasn’t given up on the idea of directing. He told the magazine, “I think it would be so fascinating and satisfying. But I don’t pretend… I would be starting right at the bottom.”

In the mean time, you’ll be able to see McGregor in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, opening March 9th, 2012, and Haywire, opening January 20th.

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The showing will mark the U.S. debut of the British comedy, which was directed by Oscar nominee Lasse Hallstrom (“My Life as a Dog”) and written by Oscar winner Simon Beaufoy (“Slumdog Millionaire”).

Two other McGregor films will also be shown at the festival: There will be a special presentation of “Haywire,” a Steven Soderbergh-directed action film also starring McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Channing Tatum and Bill Paxton; and the drama “Perfect Sense,” which co-stars Eva Green, is on the lineup, as well.

In total, the festival will host 187 films from 73 countries. There will be 61 premieres.

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The Star Wars and Moulin Rouge actor will co-star alongside Dianne Wiest and Chris Cooper in Noah Baumbach and Scott Rudin’s adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s best-seller, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.

McGregor will play Chip, the middle child of an elderly Midwestern couple (Cooper, Wiest) who reunite the family for one last Christmas.

Rudin optioned the film rights for Paramount to the National Book Award-winning novel in 2001 and would executive produce the project.

Baumbach and Franzen will pen the project and exec produce, with Baumbach directing the drama, which is currently in production.

McGregor’s TV work includes guest starring on NBC’s ER in 1997 as well as appearing as himself in the U.K. TV docuseries Long Way Down.

McGregor’s upcoming features include The Impossible and Jack the Giant Killer.

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