Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

U.K. director Ben Wheatley will take on his first U.S. project with the 1970s crime drama Free Fire. The film will star Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy, Olivia Wilde, Luke Evans, and Michael Smiley in the Boston-set story about a woman (played by Wilde) who brokers a meeting between two men (Murphy and Smiley) and a gang led by Hammer and Evans.

Jesse Eisenberg is being courted to play Lex Luthor in the upcoming Suicide Squad, about a group of supervillains brought together to tackle high-risk black ops missions for the government.

MGM offered a big deal at auction for Cop Swap, a comedy from Hot Tub Time Machine helmer Steve Pink. The premise is based on the real international exchange program of major metropolitan police departments across America where an ensemble of cops from foreign cities, all misfits in their home police forces, travel to the U.S. for a year-long internship with the LAPD.

TELEVISION

Winners at the Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards 2014 announced last week included a Best Actor nod to Matthew McConaughey for True Detective. True Detective was also given the Dagger for Best International TV Series. For all the winners, check out the ITV website.

CBS handed out a script commitment to an untitled drama from NCIS: Los Angeles showrunner Shane Brennan. The project centers on four agents who "go undercover as the perfect family for an operation that has them rooting out dangerous criminals in the suburbs while becoming an unlikely family at the same time."

ABC is putting into development the cop drama True Blue, set in the Bay Area and following two female homicide detectives who find themselves reluctantly partnered after a falling out years earlier.

The BBC has begun production on River, a new drama series written and created by Emmy award-winning Abi Morgan, starring Stellan Skarsgård (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) as John River, a brilliant police officer whose genius and fault-line is the fragility of his mind - a man haunted by the murder victims whose cases he must lay to rest.

Michael Kenneth Williams, Amara Karan, Jeannie Berlin and Glenne Headly have joined the cast of HBO’s eight-hour miniseries Crime, which originally starred the late James Gandolfini in the pilot. John Turturro is replacing Gandolfini as an ambulance-chasing New York City attorney who gets in over his head when he takes on the case of Pakistani Nasir Khan (Riz Ahmed), accused of murdering a girl on the Upper West Side.

Lifetime has ordered a six-episode limited series, Lizzie Borden: The Fall River Chronicles, with Christina Ricci reprising her role as the notorious murderer that she played in the original movie Lizzie Borden Took An Ax.

Netflix's finally released the title for its new psychological thriller drama from Sony Pictures TV, as well as a trailer. Bloodline centers on a close-knit family whose secrets are revealed when their estranged, eldest son (played by Norbert Leo Butz) returns home.

TNT has ordered an untitled 10-episode series as a spin-off to the real-life investigation series Cold Justice. The new series will follow a pair of crime experts as they travel the country to assist local law enforcement in closing long-unsolved cases, but will focus on sex crimes rather than homicides.  

CBS reduced the episode order for CSI to 18 episodes, down from 22. The show is in its 15th season, and this is the first time the drama will have produced less than a full season of episodes.

In happier episode-order news, ABC upped the number of episodes for several of its series, including Castle, which will get one additional show, bringing its total from 22 to 23.

In casting news, Deadline reported that Roger Howarth (General Hospital) has landed a recurring role on CW’s superhero series The Flash, playing an award-winning reporter from the Central City Picture News; and Ryan Hurst (Sons Of Anarchy) has joined the cast of A&E’s Bates Motel in a recurring guest star.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

You still have time to listen to the BBC radio play of Ian Rankin's Set in Darkness, featuring Inspector Rebus.

THEATER

The Sydney Opera House is staging a production from playwright Joanna Murray-Smith and Director Sarah Goodes, a thriller about the master of crime-thrillers, Patricia Highsmith. Holed up in a house in the Swiss Alps, the hardened and eccentric writer (played by Sarah Peirse) lives in the secluded company of her cats, guns and books until her isolated retreat is disrupted by a young publisher rep (Eamon Farren) who comes to extricate a final novel in Highsmith’s famous Ripley series. The production plays from November 3 through December 27.