Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Sony Pictures has won a bidding war to adapt David Ignatius’s spy novel The Director, which will reunite the Captain Phillips team of producer Scott Rudin and director Paul Greengrass. The story centers around Graham Weber, who's only been director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid walks into the American consulate to announce the agency has been hacked and he has a list of agents’ names to prove it.

DreamWorks Studios has acquired the rights to remake the 2011 French thriller The Prey (La Proie). The film centers on a low-level crook who must break out of jail to save his family from his former cellmate who is a sadistic serial killer.

Scott Cooper is in negotiations to rewrite and direct Black Mass, the drama about the Boston crime kingpin-turned-fugitive Whitey Bulger. Meanwhile, talks are to be ongoing for Johnny Depp to possibly play Bulger in the film.

Actor Elijah Wood and his horror-thriller label are moving ahead with a planned trilogy of films following the rise of a serial killer at ages 9, 14 and 18. Craig Macneill is directing the first movie, titled The Boy, from a screenplay he wrote with Clay McLeod Chapman, who created the characters in his novel Miss Corpus.

The FX Network has bought the rights to air some of the award-winning movies from Hollywood this season, including American Hustle, Wolf of Wall Street and Lone Survivor.

TELEVISION

TV Guide takes a look at the exit of long-time SVU character Capt. Cragen and what this means for the series.

Omnimystery News reported that NBC has ordered a pilot based on the Spanish comedy crime drama The Mysteries of Laura (Los Misterios de Laura), which aired for three seasons. The story followa a recently-divorced female homicide detective who solves complicated cases while taking charge of two small potential criminals: her children.

NBC gave the go-ahead to State of Affairs, a pilot starring former Grey's Anatomy star Katherine Heigl. She'll play a key CIA attaché who counsels the president on global high-stakes incidents while navigating her complicated personal life. The pilot is being re-written and directed by by Joe Carnahan, who also directed the pilot for NBC’s Blacklist.

Benjamin Bratt has joined the cast of the revival of 24 on Fox. He'll play a man who commands the CIA operation in London that is pursuing Jack (once again played by Keifer Sutherland), who is now an exile and a fugitive from justice.

Kyle Chandler has signed to star in Netflix's untitled 13-episode psychological thriller from the creators of Damages. The project is about a family of adult siblings whose secrets and scars are revealed when the black sheep oldest brother returns home.

Oscar-nominated actress Joan Allen is joining the cast of The Killing for its fourth and final season on Netflix. The six-episode series will hinge a new murder investigation led by homicide detectives Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) and Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman), with Allen playing Margaret O’Neal, the head of an all-boys military academy near Seattle.

Actor, comedian, writer and explorer Michael Palin has signed to star in the tthree-part mystery, Remember Me, for BBC One. He'll be playing an elderly man who becomes the sole witness to a violent death on the day he's due to move into an assisted-living home. A teenage care assistant (Jodie Comer of My Mad Fat Diary) and investigating police detective Rob Fairholme (Mark Addy of The Full Monty, Atlantis), "try to unravel the riddle of his mysterious history, and are drawn into an eerie and dangerous world of lost love and betrayal."

Fox is taking a new approach to pilots, focusing on series. One of the network's first orders is Runner (described as being to guns what Traffic was to drugs) that centers around on a woman who becomes embroiled in a U.S./Mexican war over weapons and terrorism after she discovers her husband isn't who she thought he was.

ABC has ordered a pilot for the supernatural crime drama Clementine. The project follows a habitual criminal who digs into the mystery of her origins after she becomes the target of a group of zealots over her latent supernatural abilities that could be harnessed for good or evil. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

ABC is shortening its series order for Killer Women, about the only woman in the testosterone-heavy Texas Rangers, due to disappointing ratings.

Mary Steenburgen has signed for a recurring role on Justified, playing a Southern belle who was the wife of Winn Duffy’s (Jere Burns) mentor in crime.

Showtime laid out what's next for Season 4 of Homeland following the game-changing third season finale. It will focus more on Carrie as a field operative doing her job in exotic locations, with Mandy Patinkin's character also playing an important role.

Thomas Dekker is returning to Fox as a regular on the network’s new drama series, Backstrom. The show is based on the Swedish book series by Leif G. W. Persson about an overweight, offensive, irascible detective who’s engaged in a constant struggle with his self-destructive tendencies.

Netflix announced that Lilyhammer will return for a third season in 2014. The series centers on former gangster Frank "The Fixer" Tagliano (Steven Van Zandt) as he enters the federal witness protection program trading the mean streets of New York for the icy fjords of Norway.

Justified showrunner Graham Yost told an audience at the Television Critics Association winter press tour that the team behind the show decided to end the FX series after its sixth season "before its stories became repetitive."

Fox added new cast members to upcoming dramas: Kendrick Sampson is joining the miniseries Gracepoint, a remake of the UK’s police procedural Broadchurch; and Kelsey Chow (One Tree Hill) has been added to Hieroglyph, a show set in ancient Egypt about a notorious thief who is plucked from prison to serve the Pharoah (Reece Ritchie), "navigating palace intrigue, seductive concubines, criminal underbellies and even a few divine sorcerers."

Jane Alexander will guest-star in an upcoming episode of Elementary, playing a pen pal of Sherlock's (Jonny Lee Miller) whom he turns to for help with a case.

Eric Bogosian, who played Captain Danny Ross on Law & Order: Criminal Intent will join CBS's The Good Wife for a multi-episode arc. He'll play an agent in the Office of Public Integrity who is convinced that Peter Florrick (Chris Noth) is guilty of voter fraud and is willing to go to any lengths to prove it.   

Mark Boone Junior (Sons of Anarchy), Rosanna Arquette, and John Benjamin Hickey will guest-star on an upcoming episode of Law & Order: SVU. Hickey will play a man who comes home from a business trip to find his young son Nicky is missing from his bed. The investigation leads to Arquette and Boone, who portray a criminal couple known for child endangerment and pornography who are spotted with Nicky.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The most recent Crime and Science Radio show is titled "The Body Tells the Tale," with DP Lyle and Jan Burke intervieweing Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson. Dr. Bass is the founder of the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility, the so-called Body Farm. Jon Jefferson is a journalist, writer, and documentary film maker. Together, the duo write fiction as Jefferson Bass.

CBS Sunday Morning featured a piece on the timeless popoularity of Sherlock Holmes.

THEATER

Maria Mondelli's romantic thriller The Window has begun performances for its short run at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City. Set in 1954, the play centers on Eva, a young, lonely woman who lives vicariously through her neighbors until Eva's wealthy aunt arrives for a stay. The aunt's mysterious disappearances, a handsome strnager who seems to know too much about the aunt, and Eva's belief she heard someone murdered in a neighboring apartment all add up to the increasing suspense.