Hey All,
RENEWAL
BET has renewed the Tyler Perry political soap The Oval for a third season. (Deadline and TV Line)
CANCELLATION
The Jordan Peele reboot of The Twilight Zone won’t be returning following its two-season run. (Variety)
NETWORK RELOCATION
After 6 seasons on TV Land, the 7th and final season of Younger will debut on Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access). However, the exact premiere date has yet to be announced. There will be 12 episodes in this final season. The show will air on TV Land, but that won’t happen until later this year. (TV Line)
TV CASTING NEWS
Actresses Vanessa Rubio and Peyton List have been promoted to series regular status on the Netflix drama Cobra Kai. Rubio plays Carmen Diaz, mom to Miguel while List plays Tory Nichols, one of the Cobra Kai students. New additions to the show will include actor Dallas Dupree Young (The Fosters) and actress Oona O’Brien (who has appeared in theatrical presentations of Annie and School of Rock). Young will recur as Kenny, a bullied new kid in school who turns to karate as a way to defend himself while O’Brien will recur as Devon, a potential new karate student who is relentlessly competitive, a quick study, and equally quick-tempered when she’s provoked. (Variety)
Actors Austin Butler (The Shannara Chronicles and the upcoming Elvis biopic from Baz Luhrmann) and Callum Turner (the latest box office movie EMMA.) will play leads in the upcoming Apple drama Masters of the Air from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. The mini-series is based on the book by Donald L. Miller, which follows the true story of the American bomber boys in World War II who brought the war to Hitler’s doorstep. Butler will play Major Gale Cleven and Turner will play Major John Egan. (Variety)
Actor Theo James (Divergent franchise and Downton Abbey) and Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones) have landed the lead roles in the upcoming HBo series based on the novel “The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. The series tells the story of Clare (Leslie) and Henry (James), and a marriage with a problem: time travel. (Variety)
Additional cast members for the upcoming Showtime anthology series The First Lady have been announced: O-T Fagbenle (The Handmaid’s Tale) will recur as President Barack Obama while Gillian Anderson (The Crown and The X-Files) will play First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The cast already includes Viola Davis as First Lady Michelle Obama, Michelle Pfeiffer as Betty Ford and Aaron Eckhart as President Gerald Ford. (Variety)
Actor Jeremy Renner (MCU franchise) will star in the Taylor Sheridan (the man behind the TV series Yellowstone) drama Mayor of Kingstown, which will air on Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access). The show will follow the McLusky family – power brokers in Kingstown, Michigan – where the business of incarceration is the only thriving industry. Tackling themes of systemic racism, corruption and inequality, the series provides a look at their attempt to bring order and justice to a town that has neither. (Variety)
The Yellowstone spin-off currently titled 6666 will be set up at Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access), and will be focused on the Ranch 6666, the one ranch in America that is most steeped in the history of the West. Still operating as it did two centuries before, and encompassing an entire county, the 6666 is where the rule of law and the laws of nature merge in a place where the most dangerous thing one does is the next thing. The 6666 is synonymous with the merciless endeavor to raise the finest horses and livestock in the world, and ultimately where world class cowboys are born and made. (Variety)
Paramount+ has picked up the TV show Halo, based on the popular and long-running sci-fi video game series on Microsoft’s Xbox, from Showtime. Actor Pablo Schrieber (American Gods and Orange Is the New Black) will play Master Chief, the lead protagonist, who is a helmeted super-soldier known as a Spartan. Actress Natascha McElhone (Designated Survivor) will play two characters: Dr. Catherine Halsey, the creator of the Spartans soldiers, and Cortana, the most advanced AI in human history who is potentially the key to the survival of the human race. (Variety)
Amblin Television will develop and produce a TV show based on the best-selling gritty historical fiction mystery franchise from author Walter Mosley focusing on Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, one of literature’s most popular Black investigators. The drama will be set in 1950’s Los Angeles. (Variety)
The Amazon anthology series Modern Love has added more cast members for its second season, including Gbenga Akinnagbe (The Deuce), Lucy Boynton (Bohemian Rhapsody), Tom Burke (C.B. Strike), Dominique Fishback (Judas and the Black Messiah and Project Power) and Garrett Hedlund (Mudbound). (Variety)
Actor Matt Lauria (Kingdom and Friday Night Lights) has joined the cast of the upcoming Amazon drama Outer Range, which will star Josh Brolin as Royal Abbott, a rancher fighting for his land and family, who discovers an unfathomable mystery at the edge of Wyoming’s wilderness. Lauria will recur Trevor Tillerson, the rival family to the Abbotts. Trevor is the eldest of the three brothers and the temperamental workhorse of his family. He takes out his frustrations on his neighbors, the Abbotts, and his aggression manages to move the simmering feud to a rolling boil whenever he crosses paths with an Abbott. (TV Line)
Actress Torri Higginson has been promoted to series regular for season 2 of the Canadian medical drama Transplant. (The Futon Critic and Deadline)
Actor Miguel Gomez (Southpaw and L.A.’s Finest) has joined the cast as series regular on FBI: Most Wanted. He will play Special Agent Ivan Ortiz, a former LAPD Gang Unit officer born and raised in Los Angeles. After a stint with the FBI’s counter-terror unit in Washington, DC, he joins the team to be with the “best of the best” who track down the country’s most wanted fugitives. (The Futon Critic and Deadline)
Actress Abigail Spencer (Timeless and Reprisal) will recur on the upcoming new ABC drama Rebel, starring Katey Sagal (Sons of Anarchy) as a legal advocate with a blue collar background, who helps those in need without a law degree. Spencer will play Misha, a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon who has a painful romantic history with Nate (Kevin Zegers) but can’t resist getting involved with studying the Stonemore heart valve for fear that she may have inadvertently harmed hundreds of patients. (The Futon Critic and Deadline)
Actor Taylor Kitsch (21 Bridges and Friday Night Lights) will star opposite Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy) in the Amazon conspiracy thriller series The Terminal List, an adaptation of the best-selling novel by Jack Carr that follows James Reece (Pratt) after his entire platoon of Navy SEALs is ambushed during a high-stakes covert mission. Reece returns home to his family with conflicting memories of the event and questions about his culpability. Kitsch will play Ben Edwards, a former SEAL and Reece’s best friend, who is now a member of CIA Ground Branch, using his intelligence access and operator skillset to help Reece seek his vengeance. (The Futon Critic and Deadline)
Actor Daniel Sunjata (Graceland and Manifest) has joined the cast of Power Book II: Ghost for the show’s second season. He will play Mecca, who will be the Big Bad in the new season. Mecca is calculated, manipulative, and dangerous. He reemerges in New York at the exact moment the Tejadas need to fill the void of a new product supplier; but when his mysterious past starts to become exposed, it reveals the drug business might not be his only end game with this family. (Deadline)
New cast members have been added to the new installment of Starz’s reimagined Step Up series – inspired by the film franchise. Those new additions include Keiynan Lonsdale (The Flash and the Divergent franchise), Enrique Murciano (Without a Trace and Tell Me Your Secrets) as well as dancer Rebbi Rosie (who has performed with Beyonce, Pharrell, J. Lo and Nicki Minaj). The original series – Step Up: High Water – starred the late Naya Rivera in the lead role alongside singer-songwriter-actor Ne-Yo. Christina Milian will take over Rivera’s role of Collette Jones. The show focuses on the students and teachers at High Water Performing Arts School in Atlanta. Lonsdale will take over the role of Tal, once an outcast from Ohio, now the lead dancer; and Murciano will play Cruz, a man hoping to carve his face into the Mount Rushmore of high profile, celebrity lawyers and who will do whatever it takes to claw his way to the primetime status of Cochran, Dershowitz, and Geragos, finally joining the pantheon of litigation gods. Starz will air the first two seasons of the series, which aired on YouTube, beginning Friday, March 5 across all platforms. (Deadline)
BOX OFFICE CASTING NEWS
George Clooney and Julia Roberts will appear in the new romantic comedy film Ticket to Paradise, appearing as a divorced couple who journey to Bali to stop their daughter from getting married. (Deadline and Variety)
Actress Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil franchise) and actor Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy) will appear in the box office movie In the Lost Lands, based on the story by George R.R. Martin. In the movie a queen, desperate to fulfill her love, makes a daring play: she hires the sorceress Gray Alys (Jovovich), a woman as feared as she is powerful. Sent to the ghostly wilderness of the Lost Lands, Alys and her guide, the drifter Boyce (Bautista), must outwit and outfight man and demon in this fable that explores the nature of good and evil, debt and fulfillment, love and loss. (Variety)
It looks like Ray Donovan will continue on after all. After the surprise cancellation after 7 seasons, the Showtime series will return as a movie, starring Liev Schreiber in the lead role. Schreiber will also co-write the script. The film picks up where Season 7 left off, with Mickey (Jon Voight) in the wind and Ray determined to find and stop him before he can cause any more carnage. It will also weave together the present-day fallout from the Donovan/Sullivan feud with Ray and Mickey’s origin story from 30 years ago. (Variety)
Actress Rachel Zegler, who will be seen in the upcoming remake of West Side Story, has landed her next role. She has joined the cast of Shazam: Fury of the Gods. (Deadline)
Actress Judy Greer will appear in the Disney sequel to Stargirl, playing the role of Ana opposite Grace VanderWaal who plays the lead character. The sequel will follow Stargirl’s journey out of Mica and into a bigger world of music. Ana is Stargirl’s mother and the duo will be moving to Los Angeles, where the latter is working on a film. (Deadline)
That’s it. Enjoy!
