Rueben's Ramblings

Hi All,

Here are the news items for this past week:

ENTERTAINMENT NEWS

Roku has bought the majority rights to the original programming provided by the recently defunct Quifi, making more than 75 shows available free to stream in 2021 on the Roku Channel (Variety)

TV CASTING NEWS

Actress Camille Guaty (Scorpion and Daytime Divas) will have a multi-episode arc on The Rookie, playing Sandra De la Cruz, a businesswoman with nefarious connections who has been the target of a murder attempt. (Deadline)

Actor Clancy Brown (Emergence, Billions and Sleepy Hollow) will play the primary villain on the Dexter revival that is in the works at Showtime. Brown will play Kurt Caldwell, the unofficial mayor of the small town of Iron Lake. It’s unclear if Iron Lake will serve as the setting for the 10-episode revival, which will pick up in real-time seven years after the 2013 series finale. The controversial closer sent Dexter into fake death-imposed exile in the woods of Oregon. (TV Line)

Actress Aliyah O’Brien (Rookie Blue and Take Two) has landed a recurring role on DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, playing Kayla, a fearsome warrior with a high body count and low patience for human incompetence. (Deadline)

Big screen actress Catherine Zeta-Jones (Chicago and The Mask of Zorro) will appear in the upcoming season of Prodigal Son, playing Dr. Vivian Capshaw, the on-screen foil to Michael Sheen’s character Martin Whitly. She will appear in the latter half of the season. (TV Line)

DEVELOPMENT NEWS

HBO Max has made it official. The Sex and the City revival, which will have the new title And Just Like That…, will be happening with Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon all reprising their roles. Kim Cattral will not be involved in the revival, which will follow Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte as they navigate the journey from the complicated reality of life and friendship in their 30s to the even more complicated reality of life and friendship in their 50s. (TV Line)

A BBC adaptation of the best-selling thriller The Girl Before will star Gugu Mbatha-Raw (The Morning Show) in the lead role of Jane, a traumatized woman who falls in love with an extraordinary minimalist house, which remains under the spell of the architect who originally designed it. When she discovers that another damaged woman died in the same property three years earlier, she starts to wonder if her own story is just a rerun of the girl before. (Deadline)

The CW has decided not to move forward with the Arrow spin-off Green Arrow and the Canaries that would have starred Katherine McNamara as Mia Smoak, Katie Cassidy as Laurel Lance, and Juliana Harkavy as Dinah Drake. The network is still thinking about the potential spin-off to The 100 and a number of other new superhero shows. (Variety and Deadline)

Actor Keegan-Michael Key (The Prom) is set to executive produce and star in the ABC drama series based on the August Snow crime novels from author Stephen Mack Jones. The tagline for the show is this: The son of an African-American father and a Mexican-American mother, August grew up in the city’s Mexicantown and joined the police force only to be drummed out by a conspiracy of corrupt cops and politicians. But August fought back; he took on the city and got himself a $12 million wrongful dismissal settlement that left him low on friends. He has just returned to the house he grew up in after a year away, and quickly learns he has many scores to settle. (TV Line and Deadline)

MOVIE CASTING NEWS

Actress Raven Goodwin (The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel) will play legendary actress Hattie McDaniel, the first African American to ever win an Oscar, in the upcoming box office film Behind the Smile. (Deadline)

That’s it. Enjoy!