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/MOVIES
Beverly Hills Cop is returning after Paramount made a one-time license deal (with an option for a sequel) that will enable Netflix to make the fourth installment of the film with Eddie Murphy and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. The studio had been developing a reboot for a while, and Netflix jumped at the chance for a potential big-star franchise.
John Woo’s forthcoming remake of his 1989 crime drama, The Killer, has had a bit of setback after star Lupita Nyong’o had to back out of the project. The iconic director note that it was a scheduling problem because "she’s so popular right now" and script rewrites had taken longer than expected, affecting the star's availability. Woo's project is still being planned as a gender-flipped take on the classic drama starring Chow Yun-fat.
Screen Gems has preemptively bought Reparations, a script by Jeff Howard and Andre Owens described as "an action heist movie interwoven with a socially conscious theme." Although some details of the plot are sketchy, here's the pitch: When a lost cache of Confederate gold falls into the wrong hands, an amateur crew comes together to get the gold and use it to fund long overdue reparations.
Shailene Woodley is set to star in the title role of Girl Named Sue, the true story of California DEA agent Sue Webber-Brown and her role in creating the Drug Endangered Child (DEC) protocol. Set in the in the ’90s at the height of the crystal meth crisis, Webber-Brown fights her way into the boys’ club of law enforcement where she takes it upon herself to help the small children overlooked during raids, a decision that will change her life forever.
Filming is underway on Deep Water, the first movie from Indecent Proposal and Fatal Attraction director Adrian Lyne in almost two decades. Adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel, the story follows Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas who play Vic and Melinda Van Allen, an attractive young married couple whose mind games with each other take a twisted turn when people around them start turning up dead.
TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES
CBS has put in development Borrowed Time, a drama from writer Amanda Green, Elizabeth Banks, and Max Handelman. Written by Green, Borrowed Time follows a cop who wakes up in the body of a stranger with no memory of who she is. The search for her identity is complicated by someone who is trying to kill the person whose life she is inhabiting. She prevents the murder, only to awaken in a different body with a new mystery to solve.
Fox has given a script commitment plus penalty to Sometimes I Lie, a limited series starring and executive produced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum, Sarah Michelle Gellar. The project, based on former BBC journalist Alice Feeney’s debut novel, stars Gellar as Amber Reynolds, who is in a coma. She can’t remember how she got there, but she knows it wasn’t an accident. Terrified and trapped in her own body, she tries to piece together her memories of the last week, knowing that someone is lying and that her life is still very much in danger.
Amazon Studios has picked up a fourth and final season of Goliath, its original legal drama series from David E. Kelley and Jonathan Shapiro that stars Billy Bob Thornton. Thornton won a Golden Globe for playing McBride, the hard-living, once-famous L.A. lawyer with a complicated past who seeks redemption by solving cases nobody else can crack.
Gary Oldman is to star in the spy drama, Slow Horses, for Apple's new digital TV serivce with Justified’s Graham Yost exec producing. Based on Mick Herron’s spy novels, the project features Jackson Lamb, a brilliant but irascible leader of a group of spies, who end up in MI5’s Slough House, having been exiled from the mainstream for their mistakes.
Don Johnson, set to reprise the title role in USA Network’s upcoming Nash Bridges revival, confirmed today that longtime co-star Cheech Marin will be back for the reboot reprising his role as Inspector Joe Dominguez. The original series, which ran on CBS from 1996 to 2001, starred Johnson as an investigator in an elite Special Investigations Unit of the San Francisco Police Department.
ITV has cancelled Rob Lowe’s British cop drama, Wild Bill, after just one season. The West Wing star played high-flying U.S. cop Bill Hixon, who was appointed Chief Constable of the East Lincolnshire Police Force in the UK.
The pilot for Last Summer, the Freeform thriller from Jessica Biel and and Michelle Purple, has assembled a strong cast including Michael Landes, Brooklyn Sudano, Harley Quinn Smith, Chiara Aurelia, Mika Abdalla, Froy Gutierrez, Allius Barnes, Blake Lee, and Nathaniel Ashton. Last Summer is an unconventional thriller that actually takes place over three summers in the '90s in a small Texas town when a beautiful popular teen, Kate (Abdalla), is abducted and, seemingly unrelated, a girl, Jeanette (Aurelia), goes from being a sweet, awkward outlier to the most popular girl in town and, by ’95, the most despised person in America.
Tamara Podemski is set to co-star in Run, HBO’s romantic comedic thriller pilot from Killing Eve creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her frequent collaborator Vicky Jones. Run centers on Ruby (Merritt Wever), a woman living a humdrum existence who one day gets a text inviting her to fulfill a youthful pact, promising true love and self-reinvention, by stepping out of her life to take a journey with her oldest flame. Podemski plays Babe, a soft-spoken police detective with a dry sense of humor, whose first big case offers her the chance to show off her genuinely good police skills and also meet someone who might change her life forever.
Austin Stowell is joining the upcoming streaming drama, The Old Man, as a series regular, playing a younger version of Jeff Bridges’ character Dan Chase. The series is based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Thomas Perry and centers on the titular "old man" (Bridges), who absconded from the CIA decades ago and now lives off the grid. When an assassin arrives and tries to take Chase out, the old operative learns that to ensure his future he now must reconcile his past. Stowell’s story as the younger Dan Chase will take place thirty years prior to the events of the pilot, as he undertakes a dangerous mission against the backdrop of the Soviet-Afghan war.
Lorraine Toussaint, Chet Hanks, and Jimi Stanton are set to recur in Your Honor, Showtime’s limited series starring Bryan Cranston. Based on the Israeli drama format Kvodo, the legal thriller stars Cranston as a respected New Orleans judge whose son is involved in a hit-and-run that leads to a high-stakes game of lies, deceit and impossible choices.
CBS will finally air a crossover between its Friday night, set-in-Hawaii dramas Hawaii Five-0 and Magnum P.I. Peter Lenkov, executive producer on both series, announced the crossover in an interview with TV Line, explaining that the story will involve the two sets of investigators converging on the same hotel. Lenkov described the event as "a big-stakes story that really feels like a two-hour movie." The episodes are set to air back-to-back on Friday, Jan. 3.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO
It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club welcomed Navada Barr, the award-winning novelist and New York Times best-selling author of the Anna Pigeon mysteries.
Dean Koontz was the guest on Meet the Thriller Author, discussing Nameless, his new series of short thrillers available for free to Prime and Kindle Unlimited members.
Write Place, Wrong Crime host, Frank Zafiro, chatted with John Sheppherd about his career in low budget movies, and his book Bottom Feeders, which is about a murder...on the set of a low budget movie.
Two Crime Writers and a Microphone hosts, Steve Cavanagh and Luca Veste, talked about the end of times; which crime writer they would like to team up with come the zombie apocalypse; trying not to slander Jeffery Archer; the vagaries of American toilets, and much more.
This week's topics on the Writer's Detective Bureau, hosted by veteran Police Detective Adam Richardson, were "20BooksVegas, POIs and UNSUBs, and Wiretap Technicalities."
THEATRE
Baltimore, Maryland's Everyman Theatre continues its 2019/2020 season with Agatha Christie's famous whodunit, Murder on the Orient Express. Everyman's production, directed by Founding Artistic Director, Vincent M. Lancisi, was adapted by noted playwright Ken Ludwig (Lend Me A Tenor; Crazy For You), and runs December 3, 2019, through January 5, 2020.
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