It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:
THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES
Golden Globe nominee, Aaron Eckhart, is set to lead Midair, an action thriller set in the skies, which starts production in July. Magnus Martens (SAS: Red Notice), is directing from a script penned by George Mahaffey (Chief of Station; Heatseekers). After flying rogue missions for the CIA, a cargo pilot’s flight goes haywire when he’s stalked, midair, by a terrorist who forces him to overcome a series of deadly obstacles. To outsmart him and keep everyone alive, he must outmaneuver the terrorist and uncover the truth.
Director James Hawes has found his next major studio project, boarding the 20th Century thriller, Amateur, starring Oscar winner Rami Malek. The story follows a CIA cryptographer whose wife is tragically killed in a London terrorist attack. When he demands his bosses go after them, it becomes clear they won’t act due to conflicting internal priorities. So he blackmails the agency into training him and letting him go after the terrorists himself.
Universal Pictures has acquired Too Dead to Die, the forthcoming graphic novel from renowned writer/artist team Marc Guggenheim and Howard Chaykin. A prolific screenwriter, showrunner, and producer outside of his comic book and graphic novel credits, Guggenheim has also signed on to adapt the screenplay, as well as executive produce. The story centers on Simon Cross, who in the 1980s was America’s top super spy. But that was long ago, in a very different world. His allies have forgotten him, but his enemies never will. Uncertain of the future and confronted by a past come back to haunt him, a legend of espionage comes out of retirement for one final adventure.
TELEVISION/STREAMING
Universal Television is developing a TV adaptation of the novel, Stone Cold Fox, by Rachel Koller Croft, who will also pen the series. The novel is about an ambitious woman, raised by a con artist mother, who wants to escape her dark past for good. As she aims to marry into a classic American dynasty for one last con, unexpected opponents could threaten everything she’s worked so hard to achieve.
Patrick Radden Keefe’s The Snakehead, a book based on real events and described as "a mix between The Godfather and Chinatown," could be heading to the small screen after A24 won the rights in a bidding war. The Snakehead investigates the secret world run by a surprising criminal, the charismatic middle-aged grandmother, Sister Ping, from New York’s Chinatown, who manages a multi-million dollar business smuggling people and providing safe passage to America. Keefe's book recounts the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down. It also follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America, and along the way, paints a portrait of a generation of illegal immigrants and the intricate underground economy that sustains and exploits them.
Social Distance creator, Hilary Weisman Graham, has been brought in as executive producer and co-showrunner of the new CBS drama series, The Never Game, starring and executive produced by Justin Hartley. Graham will share showrunning duties with executive producer, Ben H. Winters (author of The Last Policeman), who wrote the pilot based on the bestselling novel by Jeffery Deaver. The Never Game, slated for launch during the 2023-24 season, features Hartley as lone-wolf survivalist Colter Shaw, who roams the country as a "reward seeker," using his expert tracking skills to help private citizens and law enforcement solve all manner of mysteries while contending with his own fractured family. In addition to Hartley, the cast also includes Robin Weigert, Abby McEnany, Eric Graise, and Fiona Rene.
Rachel Hilson (The Good Wife; This is Us) will star alongside Josh Holloway in J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan’s period drama, Duster, after HBO Max handed the project an official series order. Hilson will portray Nina, the first Black female FBI agent, who in 1972 heads to the Southwest and recruits a gutsy getaway driver (Holloway), the first in a bold effort to take down a growing crime syndicate. Keith David, Sydney Elisabeth, Greg Grunberg, Camille Guaty, Asivak Koostachin, Adriana Aluna Martinez, and Benjamin Charles Watson also star.
The Resident creator, Amy Holden Jones, is turning to crime. Holden Jones, whose medical drama has just finished its sixth and possibly final season on Fox, has teamed up with The Gifted and Burn Notice creator, Matt Nix, to develop a new crime procedural for the network. Archie & Pete follows an explosive, rule-breaking, and fearless female detective who solves cases for the Los Angeles Violent Crimes Unit with the help of a polite and gentle brainiac who studies the biology of evil.
NBC has commissioned writers rooms for two hourlong crime drama projects, Grosse Pointe Garden Society (from Good Girls creator Jenna Bans and her frequent collaborator Bill Krebs), and The Hunting Party (from writer-producer JJ Bailey). Grosse Pointe Garden Society follows four members of a suburban garden club, all from different walks of life, who get caught up in murder and mischief as they struggle to make their conventional lives bloom. The Hunting Party revolves around a small team of investigators who are assembled to track down and capture the most dangerous killers our country has ever seen, all of whom have just escaped from a top-secret prison that’s not supposed to exist. Bans and Krebs also have the crime drama, Murder by the Book starring Good Girls' Retta, in the works at NBC.
A new version of the 1970s buddy cop series Starsky & Hutch is in the works at Fox, with a female twist: the modern re-imagining will revolve around two female detectives, Sasha Starsky and Nicole Hutchinson. The duo solve crimes in the offbeat town of Desert City "while staying true to their friendship, their awesomeness, and somehow also trying to unravel the mystery behind who sent their fathers to prison 15 years ago for a crime they didn’t commit." The original series, which aired on ABC from 1975-1979, centered on two detectives — the streetwise David Michael Starsky (played by Paul Michael Glaser) and the by-the-book Kenneth Richard "Hutch" Hutchinson (David Soul) — traversing the streets of the fictional Bay City, California in a two-door Ford Gran Torino.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO
It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club featured a lively interview with Gregg Hurwitz, author of The Last Orphan, #8 in the Orphan X series.
On the Writers Detective Bureau podcast, Detective Adam Richardson did a deep dive into why your character might want to be a police detective; plus he discussed police batons and martial arts in law enforcement.
On Crime Time FM, Simon Mason spoke with Paul Burke about his new novel, A Broken Afternoon: a DI Ryan Wilkins Mystery; Oxford; Morse; and publishing.
The Red Hot Chili Writers chatted with bestselling crime writer Laura Wilson; discussed Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival; and looked at the ins and outs of French publishing.
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