It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a new roundup of crime drama news:
THE BIG SCREEN
Lionsgate has picked up North American distribution rights to the cop drama, Semper Fi, starring Divergent actor Jai Courtney. Known internationally as Edge Of Dawn, the film follows Cal (Courtney), a by-the-book police officer who makes ends meet as a reservist in the Marine Corps along with his rowdy and inseparable group of childhood friends. When Cal’s younger, reckless half-brother, Oyster (Nat Wolff), accidentally kills a guy in a barfight and tries to flee, Cal is torn between his family and his job.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Nick Vallelonga is teaming up with Nicolas Cage for the action-thriller, 10 Double Zero. The cop thriller is set in the stifling heat of Louisiana and will follow two police officers who take on a personal vendetta to hunt down cop killers, but as they get closer to solving the crime, they find themselves targets of a conspiracy in the ranks of the police force.
Bohemian Rhapsody star Rami Malek is in talks to join Denzel Washington in the cast of Warner Bros.’ Little Things. Malek would star as a young detective who teams up with a burned-out deputy sheriff (Washington) on the hunt for a serial killer.
X-Men: Apocalypse star Alexandra Shipp and Riverdale's Cole Sprouse are joining the true crime feature, Silk Road, about criminal mastermind Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson), who unleashed the Darknet, and the "Jurassic Narc" (Jason Clarke) bent on bringing down the young kingpin’s billion-dollar empire. Darrell Britt-Gibson (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri) and Jimmi Simpson (Date Night) also star.
The Navot Papushado-directed action thriller, Gunpowder Milkshake, has cast Carla Gugino as a lethal assassin, starring alongside Karen Gillan, Lena Headey, Michelle Yeoh, Angela Bassett, and Paul Giamatti. The plot is being kept under wraps but is described as a high-concept assassin story that has a rich mythology and spans several generations.
Famke Janssen (Taken) has joined Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the cast of the crime thriller, The Postcard Killings. Morgan plays Jacob Kanon, a New York detective intent on capturing his daughter’s murderer, while Janssen plays Valerie Kanon, the mother of their now-deceased daughter.
Twilight's Cam Gigandet is set to star in Marco Ristori’s action-drama Wreckage. The project charts the story of man who finds himself trapped in the rubble of a building following a terrorist attack. His only contact with the outside world is a compassionate counter-terrorism agent on the other end of his cell phone.
The international spy thriller, 355, has added Sebastian Stan and Edgar Ramirez to the cast and set a July 8 production start in Paris, London, and Morocco. The production also stars Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Penelope Cruz, and Fan Bingbing as spies from international agencies tasked with stopping an event that could thrust our teetering world into total chaos. Along the way, a new faction is formed – code-named "355" (a name they adopt from the first female spy in the American Revolution).
Madelaine Petsch is set to star in Sightless, an indie thriller written and directed by Cooper Karl. She'll play a woman viciously blinded by an unidentified assailant. Now a veritable shut-in, living and working out of her apartment and never venturing outside, she waits for her assailant to make his next move.
A trailer dropped for the third installment of the "Olympus" series, Angel Has Fallen, with Morgan Freeman And Gerard Butler back as Secret Service agent Mike Banning and the President of the United States, respectively.
TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES
At the recent BAFTA Awards in the UK, a couple of crime dramas were big winners, including Killing Eve (Best Drama Series; Best Actress, Jodie Comer; Best Supporting Actress, Fiona Shaw) and A Very English Scandal (Best Director, Stephen Frears; Best Supporting Actor, Ben Whishaw).
Netflix has picked up the Spanish crime pic Eye For An Eye by director Paco Plaza. Luis Tosar stars in the revenge-thriller about a retirement home nurse who becomes entangled with a feared cartel boss discharged from prison and put into his care.
There are cast changes for Get Shorty, the Epix series based in part on Elmore Leonard's 1990 bestselling novel: Isaac Keys has been promoted to series regular and Michaela Watkins (Casual) and Seychelle Gabriel (Sleepy Hollow) have been tapped for recurring roles on the upcoming third season. The series follows Miles Daly (Chris O’Dowd), a muscle for a Nevada crime ring who tries to become a movie producer in Hollywood with the help of a washed-up producer, Rick Moreweather (Ray Romano), as a means to leave his criminal past behind.
Rob Lowe is joining Ryan Murphy's 9-1-1 television franchise in a spin-off set in Austin, Texas called 9-1-1: Lone Star. The new series will follow Lowe's sophisticated New York cop who, along with his son, re-locates to Austin and must try to balance saving those who are at their most vulnerable with solving the problems in his own life.
Season 2 of the AT&T Audience Network's spy thriller, Condor, has rounded out its cast with the additions of Constance Zimmer (House of Cards), Toby Leonard Moore (Billions), Rose Rollins (The Catch), Isidora Goreshter (Shameless), Eric Johnson (Vikings), Alexei Bondar (The Americans) and Jonathan Kells Phillips (Madam Secretary). In season two, Joe Turner (series star Max Irons) is forced to return to the CIA’s tight-knit Virginia community after his Uncle Bob’s death, to find the Russian traitor who’s responsible.
The finale of CBS’s FBI marked the final episode for co-star Sela Ward, an unsurprising move since Ward had a one-year deal for the crime drama series. On FBI, Ward played Special Agent in Charge Dana Mosier. At the end of the Season 1 finale, Dana reveals to her team that she had submitted her resignation.
Breakout true-crime anthology series, Dirty John, will move from Bravo to sister NBCUniversal network USA for its second season, expected to premiere in 2020. With its first season, starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana, Dirty John became the highest-rated scripted series ever on the network, with ratings growing throughout its run.
True crime is also coming to the BBC: The controversial Novichok poisonings in the UK are to be the basis for a drama on BBC Two. Titled Salisbury, the show will tell the story of how ordinary people reacted to the crisis as their city became the focus of an unprecedented national emergency.
Here is ABC’s fall 2019-20 schedule, followed by brief analysis and detailed descriptions of the network’s new series, including the new mystery-themed thriller drama, Emergence, on Tuesdays at 10pm; the new crime drama Stumptown Wednesdays at 10; and How to Get Away with Murder, Thursdays at 10. The Rookie also continues in its second season, scheduled for Sunday nights at 10. You can check out a trailer for Stumptown via this link.
With the exception of the courtroom drama All Rise, most of the CBS pilots are dead with one exception, the conspiracy thriller drama, Surveillance, starring Chicago PD alumna Sophia Bush. The pilot has supporters at the network which is actively looking for ways to take it to series, including a possible summer run. Surveillance is described as a complex and timely spy thriller centered around the head of communications for the NSA (Bush), a charming operative who finds her loyalties torn between protecting the government’s secrets and her own.
CBS's recently announced fall schedule includes the usual lineup of crime dramas: new shows All Rise, FBI: Most Wanted (midseason), and Tommy (midseason); and returning shows Bull, the three NCIS franchises, FBI, Seal Team, S.W.A.T, Hawaii Five-0, Blue Bloods, Magnum PI, and "Crimetime Saturday," which will present some of the favorite procedurals from the rest of the week. You can catch trailers for the new shows here.
At NBC's upfront presentation, the network unveiled the fall schedule for returning shows such as the "Chicago" franchises (Med/Fire/P.D.), The Blacklist, Law & Order:SVU, and the new legal drama, Bluff City Law, starring Jimmy Smits. You can watch a trailer for Bluff City Law here.
Fox's fall lineup includes the new cop/serial killer drama, Prodigal Son, starring Tom Payne and Michael Sheen, scheduled for Monday nights after the emergency-responder show, 9-1-1. You can watch trailers for the new series, via this link.
Riley Smith is returning to the CW with a lead role opposite Kennedy McMann in the network’s new drama series, Nancy Drew, based on the novels featuring the iconic female teenage sleuth (McMann). Smith had been quietly cast as a series regular in the pilot in second position to his Fox drama series, Proven Innocent, but became officially available when Fox canceled the legal drama this past weekend. Smith plays the handsome and affluent Ryan Hudson whose trophy wife is the murder victim.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO
Tod Goldberg, author of Gangsterland and Gangster Nation, joined Writerly podcast host to discuss how to write a good psychopath, the morality of art, and why MFA programs need more genre writers.
Speaking of Mysteries welcomed Sean Carswell to talk about his new novel, Dead Extra, set in post World War II Southern California. It follows a man presumed dead in the war who comes home to find out that his wife has died…and that’s not the worst of it.
Meet the Thriller Author chatted with DP Lyle, MD, author of more than a dozen fiction and nonfiction books including the Samantha Cody, Dub Walker, and Jake Longly thriller series and the Royal Pains hit TV show media tie-in novels. Lyle is also the creator and host of the podcast series CRIMINAL MISCHIEF: The Art and Science of Crime Fiction.
Wrong Place, Write Crime host Frank Zafiro spoke with James Ziskin about his award-winning Ellie Stone series, being a linguist, working in Hollywood as a subtitle expert, researching historical novels, the 7 Criminal Minds blog, and being the "mayor" of basically all of the mystery writer’s conferences.
Beyond the Cover's special guest was Chris Pavone, discussing his new novel, The Paris Diversion, which follows a bored housewife who jumps back into the spy game again.
The Writer's Detective Bureau podcast, hosted by veteran Police Detective Adam Richardson, took on the topics of licensing your work, how cops deal with an a/k/a, why you should consider a p/k/a, and how detectives handle end of watch.
THEATER
Call The Midwife star Helen George will take the lead in a new stage adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel at the Theatre Royal Bath in November. The psychological thriller is largely set in Cornwall and tells a tale of trust, dark romance, and deception. It was first made into a film in 1952 with Olivia de Havilland in the titular role and again in 2017 with Rachel Weisz as the lead.
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