AWARDS
The award nomination season is in full swing, with both the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild releasing their lists last week. Big screen and small screen crime dramas were well represented in both, including American Hustle, Breaking Bad, Orphan Black, Orange Is the New Black, Ray Donovan, Boardwalk Empire, and Homeland.
MOVIES
Ridley Scott and Fox are teaming up to remake Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. No word yet on casting or whether the feature will have a period or contemporary setting.
Omnimystery News reported that Paramount is moving forward with the next installment in the "Jack Reacher" series with Tom Cruise as the ex-military loner. The film will be adapted from the most recent book in the series, Never Go Back.
Paramount is also planning on a reboot of the comedy procedural The Naked Gun, which originally starred Leslie Nielsen as Detective Frank Drebin. The studio has tapped the scripting team of Thomas Lennon and R. Ben Garant (Night at the Museum and Reno 911), to write the screenplay, with actor Ed Helms taking over Nielsen's role.
Universal announced that Justin Lin will direct the next Bourne installment starring Jeremy Renner, although series writer Tony Gilroy won't be involved this time. The studio has targeted a summer 2015 release date.
Ethan Hawke has reteamed with his Hamlet director Michael Almereyda for a contemporary take on Shakespeare's play Cymbeline. The new trailer released online features dirty cops, drug dealing biker gangs, explosions, machine guns and "lots of people looking pretty grimy." The cast also includes Ed Harris, Milla Jovovich, Penn Badgley, Anton Yelchin and Dakota Johnson.
The film adaptation of the crime thriller Cold in July by Joe R. Lansdale has been selected as one of the featured competition titles at the upcoming Sundance Film Festival. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)
TELEVISION
NBC has given the freshmen drama series The Blacklist an early renewal, not surprising since it outrated all other new series of the fall season.
Starz has dropped plans for the crime drama Fortitude, which was to air as a 13-episode series in 2014. The project would have centered on how a violent murder of a British research scientist affects a close-knit community with the unsettling horror threatening the town's future.
WGN America landed American Dream, a suspense drama project executive produced by House creator David Shore and produced by Sony TV. The story centers on a cat-and-mouse game that erupts when a Manhattan homicide cop suspects one of America’s top CEOs of being a killer.
Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (the duo behind NBC‘s live staging of The Sound Of Music), are developing an eight-hour miniseries about famous Prohibition agent Eliot Ness for NBC. The project is based on the book Nemesis: The Final Case Of Eliot Ness by William Bernhardt and follows Ness as he takes on America’s first serial killer, the so-called “Torso Killer.”
TNT gave the greenlight to a legal drama pilot co-written by Marcia Clark (the lead prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial), and Nashville showrunner Dee Johnson. Guilt By Association will be based on Clark’s novel about Rachel Knight, a Deputy District Attorney in the Special Trials Unit of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
Sydney T. Poitier (Kendra) has been tapped to play a detective in a five-episode arc on NBC’s upcoming Chicago Fire spinoff series Chicago PD, with an option to become a regular.
Tom Berenger is scheduled to guest-star on an upcoming episode of Hawaii Five-0 as the father of Danno (Scott Caan).
Morena Baccarin (Jessica) and Morgan Saylor (Dana) will not return as regulars to the Emmy-winning drama Homeland for the its fourth season, but will have the option to guest star in some episodes.
Spike TV is going forward with an adaptation of Carl Hiassen's novel Basket Case. Rob Reiner will direct and executive produce the comedy-thriller project, which centers on a newly-demoted investigative reporter who uses a team of friends, relatives, an ex-wife, newspaper misfits and his beautiful new boss to look into suspicious deaths he uncovers via the obituaries.
Sherlock fans, take heart; your waiting time for Season 3 is almost over. In the meantime, the BBC released a pre-launch trailer.
The BBC also announced they are adding three new foreign language drama series to BBC Four: Crimes Of Passion, a Swedish crime series set in the 1950s; Hostages, an Israeli thriller series; and 1864, a Danish historical drama series. A separate spy thriller series, Legacy, is also in the works, based on a 2001 novel by Alan Judd.
AMC released a trailer for its upcoming spring 2014 Revolutionary War series, titled Turn. The project is based on the book Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring by Alexander Rose, and stars Jamie Bell, Seth Numrich, Heather Lind, Meegan Warner, Kevin McNally, Burn Gorman, Angus MacFadyen, J.J. Field and Samuel Roukin.
ABC released a trailer for The Assets, an 8-part miniseries based on based on the book Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed by Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille. The series premieres on January 2.
RIP, Don Mitchell, who played a bodyguard and assistant to wheelchair-bound Chief of Detectives Robert Ironside in the original TV Ironside series. He died of natural causes at the age of 70.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO
December 14's Crime and Science Radio installment was titled "Money is The Root." Jan Burke interviewed Andrea Jacobsen, an investigator with the Financial Crimes Unit of the Alaska Bureau of Investigations, part of the Alaska State Troopers. They discussed how financial crimes and violent crimes are often interlinked, about the damage done through financial crimes, and some of the fraudster methods.
THEATER
UK's National Theatre is presenting a Christmas show that's an adaptation of Erich Käster's much-loved 1929 children's novel, Emil and the Detectives. The production will continue its run at the Olivier Theater through mid-March.
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