Hey All,
Here are the news items for this past week:
RENEWALS/CANCELLATIONS
Hallmark Channel has renewed ‘When Calls the Heart’ for a ninth season. (Entertainment Tonight)
Grey’s Anatomy will be back for an 18th season while Station 19 will be back for its 5th season. (TV Line)
FOX has cancelled Prodigal Son after two seasons. (TV Line)
UPFRONT NEWS
ABC has cancelled the dramas For Life and Rebel, while renewing The Rookie and A Million Little Things. The network has picked up the new drama Queen; and a reboot of the comedy Wonder Years (which I’m including only because of Dule Hill playing the patriarch). (Variety and TV Line)
NBC has announced that This Is Us will come to an end with its sixth season that will air during the 2021-2022 TV season. The shows on the bubble – Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, Manifest, Debris and Good Girls are currently MIA but they have NOT been cancelled yet. The network has picked up three new dramas: Ordinary Joe, La Brea and the new spin-off Law & Order: For the Defense. (The Hollywood Reporter and TV Line)
CBS has moved SEAL Team and Clarice over to Paramount+ for each show’s new season, and the network has picked up the new drama Good Sam for the fall TV season. Meanwhile, the legal drama All Rise has been cancelled after two seasons. (Variety)
The CW is going to add Saturday night programming to its weekly line-up, finally becoming a seven-nights-a-week network. This will happen starting on October 2. (TV Line)
DEVELOPMENT NEWS
AMC is working with executive producer Peter Ocko (Lodge 49 and Black Sails) on Moonhaven, a new 6-episode suspense thriller set in a utopian community on the moon, centering on Bella Sway, a lunar cargo pilot and smuggler who’s accused of a crime and finds herself marooned on Moonhaven, a 500-square-mile utopian community on the moon that was built to find solutions to problems on Earth. She gets pulled into a conspiracy to control the artificial intelligence that runs the community, teaming with a local detective to stop forces that want to destroy Earth’s last hope. (The Hollywood Reporter)
A spin-off limited series to Bridgerton about a young Queen Charlotte has been ordered to series at Netflix. The series will delve into the origin story of Queen Charlotte as well as young Violet Bridgerton and Lady Danbury. (Variety)
FOX has given a straight-to-series order for Accused, a drama series from show creators David Shore (House) and Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa (both from Homeland) that will be based on the BBC series of the same name. It will be a crime anthology where each episode opens in a courtroom on the accused without knowing their crime or how they ended up on trial; told from the defendant’s point of view. Viewers will discover how an ordinary person got caught up in an extraordinary situation, ultimately revealing how one wrong turn leads to another, until it’s too late to turn back. (Variety)
TV CASTING NEWS
Greg Grunberg (Alias and Felicity) will guest star in this week’s episode of 9-1-1: Lone Star, playing someone who Tommy Vega (Gina Torres) encounters at the hospital while following up on her husband’s emergency that played out in the final seconds of last week’s episode. (TV Line)
Gillian Anderson will move from playing the prime minister of the U.K. to the mother of a future empress in her next TV role. Anderson (The Crown, Sex Education) has joined the cast of Hulu’s The Great in a recurring role. She’s set to appear in two episodes of season two as Joanna, Catherine’s (Elle Fanning) mother. Joanna is a glamorous socialite known as “the maestro of marriage” for her ability to arrange partnerships for her daughters. After hearing rumors of Catherine’s coup, she travels to Russia to see for herself. Though she’s a doting mom and Catherine loves her, Joanna may also have more sinister motives. (The Hollywood Reporter)
More cast members have been added to the HBO 5-episode limited series White House Plumbers based on the book by Egil “Bud” Krogh and Matthew Krogh (as well as public records) that follows how Watergate masterminds E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) accidentally toppled the Nixon presidency that they had been trying to protect. Gary Cole will play Mark Felt, the “incorruptible” deputy director of the FBI; Zak Orth (Revolution) will play Alfred Baldwin, a former FBI agent who answers a want-ad in a trade magazine to operate surveillance equipment, and becomes the Plumbers’ eyes and ears; Tony Plana (Ugly Betty) will play Eugenio “Muscolito” Martinez, a “hardened but melancholy” CIA commando who walks away from a failing marriage to help the Plumbers destroy the Democrats; and John Carroll Lynch will play John Mitchell, Nixon’s formidable and corrupt former Attorney General who is now the head of Nixon’s re-election campaign. The join the cast, which already includes Lena Headey, Domhnall Gleeson, Kiernan Shipka, Ike Barinholtz, Yul Vazquez, David Krumholtz, Rich Sommer, Kim Coates and Liam James. (Variety)
24 and Designated Survivor lead Kiefer Sutherland will star in a new drama series at Paramount Plus that has yet to be titled. The 8-episode series will find private espionage operative James Weir (Sutherland) in the midst of a battle over the preservation of democracy in a world at odds with misinformation, behavioral manipulation, the surveillance state and the interests that control these extraordinary powers. (Variety)
Emily Blunt will star in The English, a 6-part Western series under production by the BBC and Amazon Studios. The series will be set in the mid-American landscape of 1890, following Cornelia Locke (Blunt), an Englishwoman who arrives into the new and wild landscape of the West to get revenge on the man she sees as responsible for the death of her son. Upon meeting Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer from the Twilight movie franchise and the TV series Banshee), an ex-cavalry scout and member of the Pawnee Nation by birth, they join together and discover a shared history which must be defeated at all costs, if either of them are to survive. The cast will include Rafe Spall (Men in Black: International), Tom Hughes (A Discovery of Witches), Stephen Rea (The Crying Game), Toby Jones (the Avengers franchise) and Ciaran Hinds (Justice League). [among others]. (Variety)
Lauren Lyle (who plays Marsali on Outlander) will play lead character DS (that’s short for Detective Sergeant) Karen Pirie in the small screen adaptation of the Val McDermid novel “The Distant Echo,” a young and fearless Scottish investigator in the ITV (British network) drama series. (The National, National Newspaper in Scotland)
Stacey Abrams, the two-time New York Times best-selling author, fervent voting activist and former member of the Georgia House of Representatives, will see a small screen adaptation of her novel “While Justice Sleeps” that follows Avery Keene, a brilliant young law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Wynn, whose descent into a coma plunges the court, and the country, into turmoil and turns Avery’s life upside down. She is immediately notified that Justice Wynn has left instructions for her to serve as his legal guardian and power of attorney. Plunged into an explosive role she never anticipated, Avery discovers not only that Justice Wynn had been secretly researching one of the most controversial cases before the court — a proposed merger between an American biotech company and an Indian genetics firm, which promises to unleash breathtaking results in the medical field, but also that Justice Wynn suspected a dangerous conspiracy that infiltrates the highest power corridors of Washington. (Variety)
Torrey DeVitto and Yaya DaCosta will both leave Chicago Med at the end of this season, the show’s 6th season. While DeVitto doesn’t have a new TV gig lined up, she will appear in the upcoming indie film Skelly while DaCosta has been cast in the lead role of the upcoming FOX drama series Our Kind of People, that takes place in the aspirational world of Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, a historical stronghold where the rich and powerful Black elite have come to play for over 50 years. The series will follow strong-willed, single mom Angela Vaughn (DaCosta) as she sets out to reclaim her family’s name and make an impact with her revolutionary hair care line that highlights the innate, natural beauty of Black women. But she soon discovers a dark secret about her mother’s past that will turn her world upside-down and shake up this community forever. (TV Line, Deadline and Variety)
Jenna Dewan (Witches of East End) was featured in the promo for this Sunday’s season finale of The Rookie, she will play Nolan’s new neighbor and romantic interest. [By the way, The Rookie was renewed for another season.] What wasn’t shown in that promo was that Bob Morley (The 100) will appear as someone “who threatens to be a big problem for Lucy Chen in her undercover operation. (TV Line)
TV MOVIE NEWS
A third Psych movie is coming to Peacock with James Roday Rodriguez and Dule Hill reprising their roles of Shawn and Gus. The movie title is Psych 3: This Is Gus and it picks up on the eve of Gus and Selene’s (Jazmyn Simon) shotgun wedding and the birth of their first child, “Baby Guster.” Before the nuptials can go down, Shawn and ‘Groomzilla’ Gus must embark on a mission to track down Selene’s estranged husband. Meanwhile, Lassiter (Timothy Omundson) grapples with the future of his career. Maggie Lawson, Kirsten Nelson and Corbin Bernsen will also be back too. (TV Line)
Did you watch the Netflix movie Enola Holmes? Well, a sequel is being planned with both Millie Bobby Brown (from Stranger Things) and Henry Cavill (Superman himself) returning in the title role and Sherlock Holmes respectively. (Variety)
The next live TV musical on NBC will be Annie Live, expected to air during the holidays. (Variety)
BOX OFFICE NEWS
Quite a number of stars are joining the cast of Knives Out 2, where they will try to outmaneuver Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). They include Kathryn Hahn (WandaVision), Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy), Janelle Monae (Hidden Figures) and Edward Norton (Motherless Brooklyn). Plot details are being kept tightly under wraps, but chances are somebody will die mysteriously and there will be many, many suspects with iffy alibis, delicious backstories and ample motivation to commit murder. (Deadline and Variety)
Actress-director Regina King (A Night in Miami) will be taking the helm of a film adaptation of Bitter Root, the Harlem Renaissance-set comic book series that is set during 1924 that follows a fractured family of once-great monster hunters who face an unimaginable evil that descends upon New York City. For generations, the Sangeryes have hunted and cured those infected by a supernatural force that feeds off the prejudice of the era, transforming humans into monsters. With most of the kin dead, the surviving Sangeryes have the unenviable choice to save or kill the creatures in hopes of thwarting an invasion. (Variety)
James McAvoy (His Dark Materials and X-Men franchise) and Sharon Horgan (the Amazon series Catastrophe) will star in the box office movie Utopia that is set during the first days of the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020 until the present day, telling the story of a husband and wife who are forced to re-evaluate themselves and their relationship during lockdown. Horgan will play a charity worker who is a coordinator for all of Europe at a refugee charity, while McAvoy will play a self-employed man who runs a boutique computing consultancy. He’s been forced to furlough his staff and take up growing vegetables. The couple share a 10-year-old son, who is the one thing that has kept his parents’ relationship together until lockdown. (Variety)
Gemma Arterton (Prince of Persia and Black Narcissus) and Shazad Latif (Star Trek: Discovery) will join James Norton (The Nevers and Grantchester) in the thriller Chasing Agent Freegard, based on the story of British conman Robert Hendy-Freegard, who masqueraded as an MI5 agent and fooled several people into going underground for fear of assassination by the IRA. (Variety)
Oscar Isaac (Star Wars franchise) will star in the revenge thriller The Card Counter. The story follows Tell (Isaac), whose spartan existence on the casino trail is shattered when he is approached by Cirk (Tye Sheridan), a vulnerable young man seeking help to execute his plan for retribution on a military colonel (Willem Dafoe). Tell sees a chance at redemption through his relationship with Cirk, but keeping him on the straight-and-narrow proves impossible and drags Tell back into his dark past. Tiffany Haddish also stars. (Variety)
Boyd Holbrook (the Quibi series The Fugitive and the box office film Logan) and Shaunette Renee Wilson (The Resident) have joined the cast of the upcoming box office film Indiana Jones 5, but no details are available about what roles they will play. The film will be release in July 2022. (Deadline)
That’s it. Enjoy!
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