Hey All,
Here are the news items for this past week:
RENEWALS/CANCELLATIONS
The CW has announced that The Flash will end with its upcoming 9th season, which will consist of only 13 episodes. (TV Line)
Showtime has pulled the plug on The First Lady after only one season. (Variety)
Netflix has cancelled the teen vampire drama First Kill after just one season. (TV Line)
Freeform has renewed the drama Good Trouble for a 5th season. (The Hollywood Reporter)
MOVING
After 57 years on NBC, the soap opera Days of Our Lives will move to the streaming service Peacock. (TV Line)
DEVELOPMENT NEWS
Starz has officially announced that the prequel Outlander: Blood of My Blood is in development. The proposed series will center on the the love story of Jamie Fraser’s parents, Ellen MacKenzie and Brian Fraser. (TV Line)
TV CASTING NEWS
Nancy Travis (The Kominsky Method) and Tiera Skovbye (Riverdale) have joined the cast of the new, upcoming Hallmark Channel series Ride that will center on a rodeo dynasty. Travis will play Isabel McMurray, the tough-as-nails family matriarch fighting to keep her family legacy afloat following a tragedy while Skovbye will play Missy, a former rodeo queen who is a McMurray by marriage and struggles to find her place in the family. The cast includes Beau Mirchoff (Good Trouble and Awkward.) will play Cash McMurray, the second-born son who will carry on his family’s legacy; Sara Garcia (The Flash), who will play Valeria Galindo; and Jake Foy (Designated Survivor) who will depict Tuff McMurray, Isabel’s youngest son. Tyler Jacob Moore (Shameless) will play Gus, a handsome stranger who comes into their lives. (Deadline)
Rosanna Arquette has joined the cast of the ABC drama Big Sky for the show’s upcoming 3rd season. She will play Virginia “Gigi” Cessna, Jenny’s (series lead Katheryn Winnick) charismatic and fast-talking mother, who is also a world-class scam artist who used childhood Jenny in some of her grifts, much to the now grown Jenny’s resentment. When Gigi returns to Helena, Montana, to pull her latest con, Jenny catches on to her, and mother and daughter have to work through their relationship. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Aidan Turner (Poldark and the upcoming Leonardo) will star in the Amazon U.K. drama Fifteen-Love that will explore the fictional story of Justine Pearce (Ella Lily Hyland), a young sports prodigy, who enjoyed a meteoric rise in the world of Grand Slam Tennis, aided by her coach Glenn Lapthorn (Turner), with whom she shared an intense rapport. Together they reached the semi-final of the French Open but Justine’s dream was cut brutally short by a devastating injury and the end of her professional career. Five years later, now aged 22, Justine has a new life as a therapist at her old tennis academy Longwood, but when she makes an explosive allegation against her former coach, everyone is forced to reconsider what they thought they knew about Justine and Glenn’s past success. (Variety)
Keanu Reeves will executive produce and star inthe Hulu series Devil in the White City, based on the best-selling novel by Erik Larson, that tells the story of Daniel H. Burnham, a demanding but visionary architect who races to make his mark on history with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and Dr. H. H. Holmes, America’s first modern serial killer and the man behind the notorious ‘Murder Castle’ built in the Fair’s shadow. It is unclear which of the two characters Reeves will play. (Deadline and TV Line)
Merle Dandridge (Greenleaf), Josh Randall (Ed) and veteran actor Pat Healy have been promoted to series regulars on Station 19. Dandridge plays Chief Natasha Ross; Randall returns as Captain Sean Beckett; and Healy plays former chief Michael Dixon, who stands for everything our team despises and who has a history of undermining the crew at Station 19; and he is currently running for mayor. (Deadline)
Georgina Reilly (City on a Hill) has booked a key recurring role in the NBC reboot of Quantum Leap that will debut on the major network this fall. The series follows Dr. Ben Seong (Raymond Lee from Here and Now) as he takes the Quantum Accelerator into the past, leaving his team to figure out why he did it and bring him back. There are no specifics on what role she will play, though. (Deadline)
Susan Heyward (Orange Is the New Black) and Valorie Curry (The Following) have joined the cast of season 4 of the Amazon series The Boys, playing rookie Supes named Sister Sage and Firecracker, respectively. (TV Line)
Elizabeth Moss (The Handmaid’s Tale and Mad Men) will appear in the FX limited series called The Veil, that will be exclusively for Hulu. The show is being described as a thriller that will explore the surprising and fraught relationship between two women who play a deadly game of truth and lies on the road from Istanbul to Paris and London. One woman has a secret, the other a mission to reveal it before thousands of lives are lost. (Variety)
An end of an era is starting: Ellen Pompeo will be scaling back her duties as Meredith Gray in the exceedingly long-running ABC drama Grey’s Anatomy. Pompeo will appear in a “limited capacity” (translation about 8 episodes out of roughly 20 to 23 episodes set to be produced for the show’s 19th season. Pompeo will remain as an executive producer, and will continue to narrate every episode. She will move onto a new Hulu series that has yet to be given an official name that is inspired by the true story of a Midwestern couple who adopt what they believe is an 8-year-old girl with a rare form of dwarfism. But as they begin to raise her alongside their three biological children, they slowly start to believe she may not be who she says she is. As they question her story, they’re confronted with hard questions of their own about the lengths they’re willing to go to defend themselves, falling into a battle that’s fought in the tabloids, the courtroom and ultimately their marriage. (TV Line)
BOX OFFICE NEWS
As everyone has undoubtedly read by now, the theatrical release of Batgirl that was set to star In the Heights cast member Leslie Grace as Barbara Gordon (aka Batgirl) is not going to happen after all. (Variety)
STREAMING MOVIE NEWS
In a move that has movie fans at odds is the announcement that Jake Gyllenhaal will take on the remake of Road House, which – of course – starred Dirty Dancing hunk Patrick Swayze. This version will follow a former UFC fighter (Gyllenhaal) who takes a job as a bouncer at a rough-and-tumble roadhouse in the Florida Keys, but soon discovers that not everything is what it seems in this tropical paradise. The cast will include Billy Magnussen (No Time to Die and Into the Woods), Travis Van Winkle (The Last Ship) and Daniela Melchior (The Suicide Squad). (TV Line)
That’s it. Enjoy!
Rueben's Ramblings 