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
Emmy nominee Mckenna Grace (Handmaid’s Tale) will star in and executive produce the new psychological thriller, Straight Lies, with Alex Kalymnios set to direct. Written by Ren Trella and inspired by true events from Trella's life as a teenager, the script was a semi-finalist in the prestigious Academy Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting. The story is set in 1990 and follows a teen girl falsely accused of drug use, who's held against her will and must escape a cult-like drug rehab that is backed by the US Government. Meanwhile, her covert CIA agent father becomes so lost in political influence that he is unaware of the danger his daughter is in.
Karl Glusman (Civil War) has been set as the male lead opposite Samara Weaving in the 20th Century Studios heist thriller, Eenie Meanie, from writer-director Shawn Simmons (The Continental: From the World of John Wick). Produced by the Deadpool franchise’s Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the film follows Edie (Weaving), a former teenage getaway driver who is dragged back into her unsavory past when a former employer offers her a chance to save the life of her chronically unreliable ex-boyfriend. Glusman plays Edie’s on-again/off-again boyfriend, John.
Sophie Wilde (Talk to Me) is in talks to star in New Regency's Watch Dogs, an adaptation of the popular UbiSoft hit video game. The film is being directed by acclaimed French genre director Mathieu Turi from an original screenplay written by Christie LeBlanc, known for writing the Netflix original sci-fi thriller, Oxygen. While plot details haven't been released, the popular game is set in fictionalized versions of real-life cities at various points in time and follows different hacker protagonists who, while having different goals to achieve, find themselves involved with the criminal underworlds of their respective cities. The antagonists are usually corrupt companies, crime bosses, and rival hackers who take advantage of a fictional computing network that connects every electronic device in a city together into a single system and stores personal information on most citizens.
TELEVISION/SMALL SCREEN
Bestselling author Laura Dave is teaming with her husband Josh Singer, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter currently nominated for Maestro, to adapt Dave's forthcoming novel, The Night We Lost Him, into a feature for Netflix. The pair also collaborated on another of Dave's novels, The Last Thing He Told Me, Apple TV+’s hit limited series adaptation starring Jennifer Garner. The Night We Lost Him watches as the patriarch of a famed hotel empire dies under suspicious circumstances. Thereafter, his daughter and her estranged brother join forces to find out what happened, unraveling a larger mystery about who their father really was.
Austin Stowell (Catch-22 TV series) has been cast as young Jethro Gibbs in CBS's new drama NCIS: Origins, a prequel to the venerable procedural, which has a straight-to-series order for the 2024-2025 broadcast season. Narrated by Mark Harmon, who played the character in the original series, the prequel begins in 1991, years prior to the events of NCIS. In the series, Gibbs (Stowell) starts his career as a newly minted special agent at the fledgling Camp Pendleton office where he forges his place on a gritty, ragtag team led by NCIS legend Mike Franks. Mark Harmon and his son Sean Harmon, who portrayed Gibbs in flashbacks on NCIS and was a driving force behind the prequel, executive produce alongside David J. North and Gina Lucita Monreal who are co-writing the premiere episode and serving as co-showrunners.
MGM+ has given the green light to the mystery thriller, Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue. Eric McCormack (Will & Grace, Perception) is the first actor to be cast, playing one of the leads in the six-part ensemble limited series written, created, and executive produced by Anthony Horowitz (Magpie Murders). The story follows nine strangers who find themselves lost in a remote Mexican jungle after their small plane traveling from Guatemala to the U.S. crashes. One by one, the survivors are murdered, leaving the remaining passengers to solve the terrifying mystery before they, too, fall victim to the killer. McCormack will play Kevin, a former doctor who has been purchasing medical supplies in Guatemala.
Tracker, the first new broadcast drama to premiere this season, is also the first freshman scripted series to land a renewal for a second season. Boosted by its premiere behind the Super Bowl, Tracker ranked as the #1 most watched show on television. The series is based on the bestselling novel, The Never Game by Jeffery Deaver, and stars Justin Hartley as Colter Shaw, a lone-wolf survivalist 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.
The BBC has bought Viaplay's Rebus reboot. Set in Edinburgh, the series stars Richard Rankin (Outlander) in the title role, playing a young John Rebus as a detective sergeant, who is drawn into a violent criminal conflict that turns personal when his brother Michael, a former soldier, crosses the line into criminality. The show, based on the novels by author Ian Rankin (no relation to the actor), had originally been slated for Viaplay’s UK service but will instead run exclusively on BBC Scotland, BBC One, and BBC iPlayer this spring. The original Rebus series aired on BBC rival ITV between 2000 and 2007.
Netflix has picked up Homicide: New York, a true-crime docuseries from Law & Order creator Dick Wolf, set to debut on the streamer on March 20, and also released a trailer. It will be followed by Homicide: Los Angeles later this year. Both installments consist of five episodes each. Each "Homicide" mini-series tells the stories of a city’s most notorious murder cases by following the detectives and prosecutors who cracked them.
A trailer was released for the new Netflix limited series Ripley, set to premiere on April 4. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s bestselling Tom Ripley novels, Andrew Scott portrays the titular character, a grifter scraping by in early 1960s New York. Ripley is hired by a wealthy man to travel to Italy to try to convince his vagabond son to return home. Ripley’s acceptance of the job is the first step into a complex life of deceit, fraud, and murder.
MASTERPIECE Mystery! on PBS released a trailer for the third and final season of Guilt, beginning Sunday, April 28th, and running through four hour-long episodes. The award-winning TV series is a darkly comic Scottish thriller hailed by The Guardian as "Scotland’s answer to Fargo," and follows polar opposite brothers: unscrupulous lawyer Max McCall (Mark Bonnar, Shetland) and his softer-hearted brother Jake (Jamie Sives, Annika) as they get into and out of trouble. Guilt’s cast also includes Emun Elliott, who plays long-suffering private eye Kenny Burns, Phyllis Logan as Maggie Lynch, a formidable presence in Edinburgh’s crime underworld, and Sara Vickers as Erin Lynch, the daughter trying to distance herself from the family business.
Apple TV+ has released the official trailer for Sugar, featuring Oscar nominee Colin Farrell as John Sugar, an American private investigator on the heels of the mysterious disappearance of Olivia Siegel, the beloved granddaughter of legendary Hollywood producer Jonathan Siegel. As Sugar tries to determine what happened to Olivia, he will also unearth Siegel family secrets; some very recent, others long-buried. The first two episodes of Sugar's eight-episode season will drop Friday, April 5 on Apple TV+, followed by one new episode weekly every Friday.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO
Debbi Mack's guest for the latest episode of the Crime Cafe podcast was Southern Gothic mystery writer Faye Snowden, author of A Killing Fire and A Killing Rain, named by CrimeReads as one of the best Southern Gothic mysteries of 2022.
Spybrary Spy Book Podcast host Shane Whaley, author Paul Vidich, and Spybrarian David Craggs discussed Paul Vidich's latest spy thriller, Beirut Station: Two Lives of a Spy, a novel "pulsating with emotional depth and geopolitical intrigue."
On the latest edition of Crime Time FM, Barry Forshaw, Victoria Selman, and Paul Burke chatted about new books, SS Van Dine's Philo Vance on screen, writing to trend and branching out within the genre, the Oxford Literary Festival, and more.
On Read or Dead, Katie McLain Horner and Kendra Winchester discussed some of their underrated favorites and covered some recent crime fiction news and awards.
The Infinite Monkey Cage, a podcast hosted by Robin Ince and physicist Brian Cox, delved into the murky world of historical poisonings with the help of Hugh Dennis, chemist Andrea Sella, and Agatha Christie aficionado and former chemist Kathryn Harkup.
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine podcast featured Twist Phelan's reading of "Judge Not," her story of a local judge who faces a serious ethical dilemma, from EQMM's May/June 2023 issue.
THEATRE
Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal are slated to star in Othello on Broadway in spring 2025. The production, which will see Washington in the title role and Gyllenhaal as Iago, will be directed by Kenny Leon, who previously directed Washington in A Raisin in the Sun and Fences, opposite Viola Davis. The new production of the classic Shakespeare tragic drama, scheduled to open at an as-yet unnamed Shubert theater, follows Iago, a junior officer, as he grows jealous about being overlooked for a promotion and seeks revenge on his general, Othello.
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